The other day I needed to find a text file titled Job, so naturally I used Spotlight, but what came up was a list of Mail messages, the word job in the Dictionary, a list of Web pages and songs. The Job file was an old file, and I knew that I had it saved on an ancient diskette. The diskette was one of the few that I'd labeled properly, and I soon found the file. I then saved it as a PDF file, and went to move the new Job.pdf file to my hard drive's Documents folder. Imagine my surprise to find there a folder titled Job Copy, and inside the Job Copy folder there were a number of revisions to the file I'd made over the years, each file having the word Job in the title.

So why doesn't Spotlight work? What must I do to make it work?

After I put the new Job.pdf file in the Job copy folder, both the file and the folder now show up in the Spotlight search results, but the older Job files, all created in AppleWorks (or ClarisWorks), still do not appear in the results.

Sounds like a problem with your index. You should re-index the drive by adding the drive to your privacy exceptions in Spotlight and then removing it.