I was just mucking around and I saw that in Sherlock there is a "Languages..." button on the Preferences screen. Mine had many ones checked like French, Danish, German, etc. that I do not need. The text there says indexing will be faster and use less space if you uncheck the ones you don't need. I didn't do any tests but it did finish as I was writing this note!
Mac OS X Hints
http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=20020124094850722