Search and ye shall find (maybe): Apple's Spotlight needs an overhaul
When I backed up my home folder recently, my backup software showed that it contained 191,644 files. With a haystack that large, it can be difficult to find specific files: As an example, the other day I wanted to find an article I wrote about Spotlight, back when Apple last made a significant update to the feature.
Though I did eventually find the article, my success wasn’t due to Spotlight. (I’ll talk about what I used to find it later.) Because I didn’t know what keywords to look for, other than “Spotlight,” I got hundreds of results, and it took me a while to sift through them. The Spotlight menu offered me what it considered the most relevant results, but I had to choose Show All in Finder to discover that the search query had produced 431 matches. Though you can sort search results in the Finder by criteria such as kind and date, the sheer number of matches means that finding the right file often takes a bit of scrolling and Quick-Looking.
Spotlight was quite impressive when it debuted as part of Mac OS X 10.4. Since then, however, the feature has seen few enhancements, and Apple has removed some useful functionality.
Wheat, meet chaff
Spotlight searches provide lots of results. But how to find the right one…?
With so many files on our computers, having an efficient way to find the ones we need is crucial. I keep files in folders, and I can usually remember that I wrote, say, an article about iTunes a few months ago, and track it down. But to locate older files, users often need more help.
To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
http://www.macworld.com/article/2032180/search-and-ye-shall-find-maybe-apples-spotlight-needs-an-overhaul.html#tk.rss_all
