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Laser-Focus Your Spotlight Queries
Posted by Gina Trapani at 8:00 AM on April 4, 2008
When you just can't seem to hunt down that file you know you've got stowed away somewhere on your Mac, it's time to break out the Spotlight big guns—advanced search operators, that is. Macworld runs down advanced Spotlight operators which will be familiar to power Google searchers. Here's a sampling:
- Enclose phrases in quotes, like
"time machine"
- Use AND, OR, and NOT to narrow or widen your search, like
java NOT coffeeorinvoice OR bonus
- Search by document attributes using operators like
author:authorname,kind:pdf(for PDF files), anddate:today
Comments (AU Comments · US Comments)
There are currently no AU comments for this post.
ross.m
Posted 9:03 AM 4/4/08
I actually gave up on Spotlight and use Google Desktop. I know it might not be very Apple of me, but I really do find it's faster.
ross.m
B
Posted 8:21 AM 4/4/08
This works every where, right? Like Google and Windows search as well.
B
Dunny0
Posted 9:49 AM 4/4/08
I pretty much use Spotlight as my main program launcher now. I don't really use it for searching, unless I'm trying to find a system preference and I just can't remember where it's at.
Dunny0
TPIRman
Posted 9:38 AM 4/4/08
I found Spotlight decent but underwhelming until Leopard, when Apple fine-tuned it and sped it up to a remarkable degree. Now it's indispensable. One of my favorite ways to use Spotlight is as a quick dictionary lookup. Just type in the word and a "definition" item will appear near the top.
TPIRman
Imaginary_Friend
Posted 10:58 AM 4/4/08
EasyFind. Spotlight just doesn't cut it for me.
[www.devon-technologies.com]
Imaginary_Friend
Jono
Posted 6:50 PM 4/4/08
I use quite a lot of the 'kind:' operators. e.g.
kind:photoshop
kind:illustrator
kind:del.icio.us
etc...
They work well & you can speed up/simplify typing by using TextExpander for all the different kinds you regularly search for.
For example I type kmm which will expand to kind:movie , kdd which will expand to kind:document etc...
You can also string them together. I have one I use quite a lot which searches both web bookmarks, del.icio.us bookmarks & bookmark history: kind:bookmark OR kind:history
(I just type kbh in TextExpander).
Jono
fireshaper
Posted 12:00 AM 5/4/08
If you want to find ANYTHING on your mac, try Houdah Spot (www.houdah.com).
fireshaper
flysi
Posted 11:58 PM 4/4/08
That's a pretty fantastic tip, @Jono. I mostly use the beloved Quicksilver for del.icio.us and history searches, but I might give that a try.
flysi
amielb
Posted 7:56 AM 5/4/08
Well, this is what is fondly referred to by librarians as boolean
search operators (hint: put those three words in quotations in google
to get even more!).
Any good search engine (libraries, google, yahoo, spotlight, etc.)
will have boolean operators in-built.
My favourite? The * at the end of the word. The star tells the engine
to search for any suffixes of the preceding word (e.g. you are doing a
paper on a nickel mine, and you want to get references.. rather than
doing it for mine, mines, mining, mineral, etc. just type in min*.
Booyaka!)
amielb
Jono
Posted 5:57 AM 11/4/08
Yea, I ought to point out I use a Spotlight plug-in to search for the del.icio.us boomarks.
I tried Houdah Spot. It's really powerful but I'm not keen on the UI (wide left had search operators seems poorly thought out, & can't get over all that yellow instead of the standard UI =o¿ ).
Jono