Spotlight Overview So how does Spotlight work, anyway? There are a few different ways to access a Spotlight search on your Mac. First, you can click its magnifying glass icon, which lives at the top-right corner of your Mac’s screen by default.
Another method, and the one I prefer to use, is the Spotlight keyboard shortcut, which is Command-Spacebar by default. Regardless of whether you clicked the magnifying glass or pressed that shortcut, you’ll see a text input bar appear in the middle of your screen.
Nov 23, 2017 - In the latest insider build of Windows a new ImmersiveSearch feature has been discovered which looks and feels a lot like the Spotlight feature. The Spotlight search window can be moved around screen in modern versions of Mac OS X, which is great if you want to move the Spotlight window away from something that it’s obstructing, or perhaps because you’d rather it be in the corner of the display then in the middle of the Mac screen.
Here, you can type your search word or phrase. As soon as you start typing, the text box will expand to show you results in near real-time. The time it takes for results to appear will vary depending on the number of files you have on your Mac, the speed of your Mac’s hard drive or SSD, and the type of file system your drive is formatted as (the, introduced to the public in macOS High Sierra, allows for near-instant search results).
In the example screenshot above, I’ve searched for the Terminal app, but as I mentioned, you can look for pretty much anything on your Mac. Spotlight will even do some other neat stuff, too, like. Why these numbers? I have no idea.
Fixing Spotlight Spotlight’s really handy for a whole bunch of stuff, soyou knowit’s kind of a bummer when it stops working. What should you do if that’s the case? Well, to re-index your own Spotlight database, start by clicking on the Apple Menu at the upper-left corner of your screen and choosing “.” When that window opens, click on “Spotlight” (unsurprisingly). Under the Spotlight preferences, choose the “Privacy” tab, and then click the plus button at the bottom-left corner. Next, you’ll have to find your Mac’s startup disk, which is probably called “Macintosh HD.” An easy way to do this is to click the drop-down at the top of the following window and then choose your disk from that drop-down. As I noted, it will likely be called “Macintosh HD,” but if yours isn’t, you can tell you’ve got the right item by the icon; it will look like a silver drive. (And if you don’t see it in that drop-down at all, try clicking “Applications” or your home folder from the sidebar on the left and then looking back under the drop-down.) When you’re done with this selecting-your-disk part, click on the “Choose” button.
Your Mac will give you a big scary warning to agree to. You’ll click “OK,” but don’t worry—we’re going to turn Spotlight right back on when we’re finished with this! After you confirm that you know what you’re doing, you’ll see your drive appear under that Spotlight “Privacy” tab. Now I know we just put the drive in there, but we’re gonna take it back out, which will force Spotlight to re-index the whole disk. To do that, just click on it in your “Privacy” list to highlight it, then click the minus button at the bottom.
And you’re done! You’ll be able to tell that is doing its reindexing job if you click on its magnifying glass icon and start doing a search. When you type something in, a small progress bar will appear to let you know that the indexing isn’t done.
One final note: the Spotlight reindexing process can consume a lot of your Mac’s resources, so expect performance to take a hit while the indexing is going on. It could take a few hours to complete, too, so don’t get this started right before you absolutely need your computer to be the fastest it can be or anything.
But when everything’s done, you should be able to go back and find whatever you need to within Spotlight’s magical window. Happy searching!
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Spotlight in OS X Yosemite showing Wikipedia article on Details Type Spotlight is a system-wide feature of. Spotlight is a system, which creates an index of all items and files on the system. It is designed to allow the user to quickly locate a wide variety of items on the computer, including documents, pictures, music, applications,. In addition, specific words in documents and in web pages in a web browser's history or bookmarks can be searched. It also allows the user to narrow down searches with creation dates, modification dates, sizes, types and other.
Spotlight also offers quick access to definitions from the built-in and to calculator functionality. There are also to perform functions such as Spotlight searches. Spotlight was first announced at the June 2004, and then released with in April 2005. A similar feature for 3.0 with the same name was announced on March 17, 2009. Contents. macOS Indices of filesystem are maintained by the Metadata Server (which appears in the system as the mds, or mdworker). The Metadata Server is started by when macOS (formerly Mac OS X, then OS X) boots and is activated by client requests or changes to the filesystems that it monitors.
It is fed information about the files on a computer's by the mdimport daemon; it does not index removable media such as. Aside from basic information about each file like its name, size and timestamps, the mdimport daemon can also index the content of some files, when it has an Importer plug-in that tells it how the file content is formatted.
Spotlight comes with importers for certain types of files, such as, and documents. Apple publishes that allow developers to write Spotlight Importer plug-ins for their own file formats. The first time that a user logs onto the operating system, Spotlight builds indexes of metadata about the files on the computer's. It also builds indexes of files on devices such as external hard drives that are connected to the system.
This initial indexing may take some time, but after this the indexes are updated continuously in the background as files are created or modified. If the system discovers that files on an external drive have been modified on a system running a version of macOS older than Mac OS X 10.4, it will re-index the volume from scratch. Within Mac OS X Tiger, Spotlight can be accessed from a number of places. Clicking on an icon in the top-right of the opens up a text field where a search query can be entered. Windows also have a text field in the top-right corner where a query can be entered, as do the standard load and save dialogue boxes. Both of these text fields immediately start listing results of the search as soon as the user starts typing in a search term, returning items that either match the term, or items that start with the term. The search results can be further refined by adding criteria in a Finder window such as 'Created Today' or 'Size Greater than 1 KB'.
Mac OS X v10.4 and later also include utilities for querying or manipulating Spotlight. The mdimport command, as well as being used by the system itself to index information, can also be used by the user to import certain files that would otherwise be ignored or force files to be reimported. It is also designed to be used as a debugging tool for developers writing Importer plug-ins. Mdfind allows the user to perform Spotlight queries from the command line, also allowing Spotlight queries to be included in things like. Mdls lists the indexed attributes for specific files, allowing the user to specify which files and/or which attributes. The indexes that Spotlight creates can be managed with mdutil, which can erase existing indexes causing them to be rebuilt if necessary or turn indexing off.
These utilities are also available on. Although not widely advertised, Spotlight can perform boolean searches.
By default if one includes more than one word, Spotlight performs the search as if an 'AND' was included in between words. If one places a ' ' between words, Spotlight performs an OR query. Placing a '-' before a word tells Spotlight to search for results that do not include that word (a NOT query). Currently Spotlight is unable to index and search NTFS volumes shared via SMB.
Spotlight menu performing a search for the word ' in With, Apple introduced some additional features. With Spotlight in Tiger, users can only search devices that are attached to their computers. With Leopard, Spotlight is able to search networked Macs running Leopard (both client and server versions) that have file sharing enabled. A feature called has been added to the that will display live previews of files within the search results, so applications do not have to be opened just to confirm that the user has found the right file. The syntax has also been extended to include support for worded boolean operators ('AND', 'OR' and 'NOT').
These variants of the operators are localized; while users that have their System language set to English may use an 'AND', German users, for example, would have to use 'UND'. The character variants work with any system language. Also while Spotlight is not enabled on the server version of Tiger, it is on the server release of Leopard. In addition, where Spotlight in Tiger had a unique and separate window design, Spotlight in Leopard now shares windows with the Finder, allowing for a more unified GUI. The unique Spotlight window in Tiger allowed sorting and viewing of search results by any metadata handled by the Finder; whereas Spotlight Finder windows in Leopard are fixed to view and sort items by last opened date, filename and kind only.
Under Leopard there is currently no way to save window preferences for the Finder window that is opened via Spotlight. Since Leopard the Spotlight menu has doubled as a, with functionality very similar to the (but without the need to be online), as well as a dictionary that allows one to look up the definition of an English word using the in macOS. Yosemite. Spotlight in iOS 11 A search tool also named Spotlight has been included on (formerly iPhone OS) products since version. The feature helps users search contacts, mail, calendars, media and other content. Compared to Spotlight on macOS, the iOS search ability is limited. The Spotlight screen is opened with a finger-flick to the right from the primary home screen, or, as of iOS 7, by pulling down on any of the home screens.
The feature was announced in March 2009 and released with iOS 3.0 in June 2009. The release of iOS 4.0 included the ability to search text messages.
In, the folder that an application is inside of is now shown (if applicable). Since the Introduction of iOS 7, Spotlight no longer has its own dedicated page, but is accessible by pulling down on the middle of any Homescreen. On September 17, 2014, Spotlight Search was updated with to include more intuitive web results via and, as well as quicker access to other content. With, Spotlight Search has been updated to include results of content in apps.
Privacy concerns Since the release of Yosemite, Spotlight sends all entered queries and location information to Apple by default. The data is accompanied by a unique identifying code, which Apple claims to rotate every 15 minutes to a new identifier. In response to privacy concerns, Apple has stated that they do not use the data to create profiles of their users, and that query and location information is only shared with their partner, under a strict contract which prohibits the information from being used for advertising purposes. Additionally, Apple has stated that while Spotlight seeks to obscure exact locations, the information is typically more precise in densely populated areas and less so in sparse ones. See also. References.
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Spotlight searches the contents inside documents and information about those documents, or metadata. ^ John Siracusa (April 28, 2005). Retrieved April 4, 2007. Kirk McElhearn (July 8, 2005).
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Retrieved April 4, 2007. ^ Frakes, Dan (2009). PC World / Macworld. Retrieved December 26, 2009. IPhone Spotlight doesn't search the full content of every file on your phone. Retrieved September 17, 2014.
Fleishman, Glenn (September 16, 2015). IDG Consumer & SMB. Retrieved 2016-07-29. Ashkan Soltani and Craig Timberg (October 20, 2014). The Washington Post. Retrieved February 24, 2015. Steven Musil (October 20, 2014).
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Archived from on 2015-07-27. External links Wikimedia Commons has media related to. Archived from on Nov 15, 2004.