Getting Better Spotlight Search Results

Friday, July 16 2010

By: chrisb

Narrowing your search

Spotlight results
Click to see a larger image

Spotlight is another one of those powerful but often forgotten about tools in Mac OS X. It is the built-in search engine that searches your Mac for results in response to queries you enter. Spotlight searches file names, document contents, email messages, web history, contacts, calendar entries and more.

You activate Spotlight by clicking on the magnifying glass icon on the very right of the Menu Bar. Once you activate Spotlight, you get a search text field where you enter your query. Spotlight starts searching even as you type, narrowing down its results as you continue to type.

Most of the time, people just enter a word or phrase for Spotlight to search, but there is some additional syntax that you can use to get better search results.

Here are some types of simple queries you can enter:

gift card. This will give you any result that has the word 'gift' and the word 'card' in it, not necessarily adjacent. (This is the same as gift AND card.)
"gift card" (in quotes). This will give you any result that has the exact phrase 'gift card'.
gift OR card. This will give you any result that contains either word.
gift NOT card. This returns any result that contains 'gift' but does not contain 'card'

If you use AND, OR, or NOT, make sure to type them in CAPITAL LETTERS.

Spotlight offers many more options for making your searches more specific. If you would like to learn more, check out this article from MacWorld.