Power Search Tricks for Mac OS X Spotlight

The easiest possible search in Spotlight is to just type in a word or three and let it show you the results. Type in mashed potatoes and it'll show you anything that matches both "potatoes" and "mashed", even if it's not a phrase. Documents or files that match one word but not the other will not be shown.

Oh, before we go further, you do know that Spotlight is accessible through clicking the little magnifying glass on the top right of your Mac screen, right? It looks like this:

One way to easily improve your Spotlight search results is to put phrases in quotes. A Spotlight search for "mashed potatoes" is quite a bit more constrained than a search for mashed potatoes. Try a similar search on your site and you'll see what I mean. In fact, this is most useful when you're looking for documents that reference a particular person. With a common name like "Dave Taylor" I know just how many false hits I'll have if I forget the quotes!

It turns out that Spotlight also understands basic Boolean queries too, so you can sprinkle in OR, NOT and AND too (though "AND" is the default anyway). Now we're getting somewhere, because now you can construct a search for, say, "mashed potatoes" OR "sweet potatoes" NOT turkey NOT "thanksgiving dinner". Pretty powerful!

So that Spotlight knows what you're doing, these operators must be in all capital letters, so Dave NOT Taylor and Dave not Taylor are actually different searches with quite different results (the latter is Dave AND not AND Taylor).

Now let's get into the real power of Spotlight: keyword metadata. There are, in fact, a zillion different searches you can do because you can constrain searches to only match specific fields of information or types of data. For example, kind:mp3 limits your search to MP3 audio files. name:agenda requires the match to be with the filename, not the contents, and created:>1/1/08 only matches files created after January 1st, 2008.

The most useful of these keywords are name:, date: and kind:, all of which are demonstrated above. The "date:" keyword can also accept "today", "yesterday" and "tomorrow" (for iCal event search) in addition to the MM/DD/YY notation already shown.

The "kind:" keyword turns out to have a zillion different options. Here are a dozen of the most interesting: kind:alias (Aliases), kind:app (Applications), kind:audio (any audio file format), kind:bookmark (did you know Spotlight could search Safari bookmarks?), kind:contact (and search your Address Book), kind:email (and your Entourage or Apple Mail archive), kind:folder, kind:font, kind:event, kind:image, kind:movie, kind:pdf, kind:powerpoint and kind:word.

Toss those all into a blended and push "frappé" and I bet you can now do far, far more powerful searches than you've ever done in the past!