Spotlight - How to search your Mac

In this first installment of our 5 part series, we will be discussing Spotlight. Spotlight for Macintosh is designed to help you find ANYTHING in your Mac. Think of it as Google for your computer.

How does it work?

Spotlight searches your Mac in the background and continually updates an 'index' of any changes or new files it finds. This index can then be used to instantly, as you type, search your Mac for whatever your search terms are. For a technical discussion, please read Wikipedia's article.

How can it help me?

Spotlight is integrated into Mac OS X and can be used from your desktop, any finder window and using keyboard shortcuts.
Look at the top right of your Menu Bar and you will see an icon that looks like a magnifying glass. Click on it and a small search field will come up. Type in any word or phrase. Your Mac will instantly display a list of files and folders sorted by type that match your criteria. Note the picture here.

Here the term "Hello" was entered. You can see there are several hits. The first, "Show All" will, if selected, show all results in a new Finder window. Then, there is the "Top Hit." This is a guess as to what you may have been looking for. You can train spotlight too. Suppose what you were looking for was a text file that contains Hello in the body of the text. If you contiually select that file, Spotlight will set it high in the search priority. Pretty cool, huh?

Refined Searches.

From any Finder widow you can also search for what you need. See the picture below:

Here, you can see that the search term "Hello" has been refined to show only image files last opened before 7/11/08. If you wish to save the search for later use, you can! Simply click the "Save" button (located below the search field) and a search folder will show up under the "Search For" in the left pane under "Places."

Adding Keywords to Your Files.

Suppose you have a picture of you favorite pet and you imported it from you camera as "Spot.jpeg" but you don't really want to just type in "spot" and have every picture of a Spot or Spotted or whatever show up. What can you do? Control-click on the file and in the Spotlight info pane type in some keywords that can be useful in finding the file later. For example: "playing with Spot on the beach the summer of 2007". Now, you have several terms you can search. "Spot beach summer" should narrow your search to this file!

Use your imagination! Remember, any term you frequently search for can be saved. So have fun.

Keyboard Shortcuts.

Here are some shortcuts to get your searches:

• Command+Space: This will open the Spotlight search pane.
• Option+Command+Space: Will open and Spotlight window for refined searches.

How do you use Spotlight? I'd love to hear your comments!