I often see or hear people complaining that Spotlight is "broken".

I happen to be a big fan of Spotlight and I think on the whole it works fairly well.

I also think that some of the "broken" things that people encounter can be fixed with a little more advanced knowledge of how Spotlight works and some of the tricks you can use to find things and make your result more relevant.

Typically clicking on a result opens that item, but what if you want to open the folder containing that items to see where it is in the Finder?

Hit Command + Enter on the highlighted file in Spotlight to open it’s location in a new Finder window.

Use Command+I on a highlighted item to get info on it right from Spotlight result

In Lion you can drag item directly out of the results

Drop directly onto an app in the dock to open in that app

Drag out to make a copy of that file (notice the "+" icon)

Hold Command+Option to create an Alias

In Lion, you get the preview when you hover, but it has it's own tricks

If you press and hold the Command key it will pop-up the Preview of the Top Hit

Hold down the command key to get a scrolling list of additional info at the bottom of the preview window

Path to file

Matched metadata information

Mailbox

Press Command-Option to see the path instantly.

Some file types can have interaction

Contact field labels can be clicked (just like in Address Book) for additional info

Accessed from the Finder, using Command+F or Option+Command+Space from anywhere

You can change this setting in System Preferences > Spotlight

Set the 'Spotlight Window Keyboard Shortcut'

Top of the Window offer 3 search locations

This Mac (default), the current folder or volume you initiated the search from, and I have the 'Shared' folder

Click the small + button right next to “Save”, you can add additional search parameters.

File kind: Here you can select the kind of file you are looking for. This allows you to, for example, specifically search for PDF files only

Last opened date: This is the time the file was last opened/read

Last modified date: This is the time the file was last written and therefore changed

Created date: This is the time the file was initially created

Name: This is the file name only

Contents: These are the contents of the file itself, which is particularly helpful for text documents such as PDFs or Word files.

Other…: a large list of other options

You can scroll through the list or search

The "In Menu" checkbox allows you to add you frequently used parameters to the main list

Two very useful ones I think are 'System files' and 'File visibility'

You can add additional search parameters by clicking the "+" button

Hold the alt key, you will see that the + button turned into an ellipsis (…), then you can add boolean style parameters. Options are Any, All, or None of the conditions are met.

Typing words will search for ALL of those words by default.

You can require exact matches to multiple words or a phrase by using enclosing quotes

Boolean keyword operators are also supported AND, OR, NOT. Typed in upper case. You can use parenthesis to group them

adding a "-" without a space in front of a term just like 'NOT;

Metadata keywords are the key to Spotlight searching power

There are 125 and growing and learning some of these will help you a lot.

The basic syntax is: AttributeType:attribute

The attribute type can often be guessed by looking at the Get Info on a file and specifically the 'More Info' section.

Pretty much any term you see listed there could be used as a AttributeType. Just type it all lowercase with no spaces followed by the ":"

There is also a great PDF document at hints.macworld.com

hints.macworld.com

Some helpful metadata keywords

kind:

image, PDF, message or email, event, contact

date:

You can use terms like "today","yesterday","this week", or dates and date ranges (i.e. 2010-2011)

name:

contains:

width:

dpi:

subject:

from: or to:

You can combine these to create some powerful results

kind:contact name:[Persons Name]

kind:jpeg width:600

kind:email date:"this week" from:[email address]

Open up Terminal. Applications > Utilities > Terminal

mdfind command to search

Type 'mdfind 'search term' and hit enter

If you need to exit the results before they finish hit Control+C

Of course you can do all the command line goodies like piping results of searches, etc.

There are several options of course, but a helpful one is '-onlyin [folder]' restricts the search to that specific folder.

Can also add in 'kMDitem' metadata keyword name value pairs. Big list at www.real-world-systems.com—mdAtt.1.html

real-world-systems.com

Rebuild Spotlight index

Apple's way:

From the Apple menu, choose System Preferences.

Click Spotlight.

Click the Privacy tab.

Drag a folder or even an entire volume (your hard drive) to the list.

Remove the item or volume you just added.

From the Terminal use the command:

sudo mdutil -E /

Then enter your admin password. It will take a moment and then return: "Indexing enabled. "

After that you should see the Spotlight Indexing animation in the menu bar.