Why does HoudahSpot not find my file?

HoudahSpot builds upon the powerful Spotlight engine. It can only find those files Spotlight knows about. Apple chose to exclude some select types of files and locations from the Spotlight index. By setting your privacy preferences you may have excluded some more.

You may force Spotlight to index otherwise excluded locations by issuing the following at the command line:
mdimport -f /path/to/the/location