Mac Search: Apple's Search Spotlight
Unlike their Windows counterparts, Mac users don't need to bolt a search engine onto their OS. The powerful Spotlight desktop search tool, built into Mac X OS 10.4 (aka Tiger), quickly finds files on hard drives, mounted network volumes, and external drives, with some not-so-insignificant limitations. (The upcoming Windows Vista will have built-in file search features.)
After Spotlight indexes your drives, you'll see an oval search field in Finder windows and the menu bar. You can designate which folders Spotlight should--or shouldn't--search. It recognizes video codec, image exposure, and other metadata, and it supports search strings, such as "yosemite kind:images" (for finding all pictures of the Yosemite Valley). You can save searches as Smart Folders, which are collections of dynamically updated search results.
Unfortunately, Spotlight does not understand such standard search operators as near, and it requires you to add a separate plug-in to search for files in non-Apple mail clients like Microsoft Entourage and Eudora. The tool also can't display nongraphic search results with context: You can't see the first few lines in a Word document, for example (you'll have to identify the file by its name or path). If users were that organized to begin with, they wouldn't need Spotlight, right?
Narasu Rebbapragada
Contributing Editor Scott Dunn writes the Windows Tips column. Narasu Rebbapragada is an associate editor for PC World.
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