Spotlight (software) Totally Explained

Everything about Spotlight Software totally explained

Spotlight is a system-wide desktop search feature of Apple's Mac OS X operating system introduced in version 10.4 on April 29, 2005. It is designed to allow the user to quickly locate a wide variety of items on the computer, including documents, pictures, music, applications, System Preferences, as well as specific words in documents. It also allows the user to narrow down searches with creation dates, modification dates, sizes, types and other attributes.

Functionality

Indexes of filesystem metadata are maintained by the Metadata Server (which appears in the system as the mds daemon). The Metadata Server is started by launchd when Mac OS X boots and runs continuously in the background. It is fed information about the files on a computer's hard disks by the mdimport daemon; it doesn't index removable media such as CDs or DVDs. 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 documents, for example Microsoft Word (DOC) and Portable Document Format (PDF) documents, and Apple publishes APIs that allow developers to write Spotlight Importer plug-ins for their own file formats.
Although not widely advertised by Apple, Spotlight can perform boolean searches. By default if you include more than one word, then Spotlight performs the search as if you including an "AND". If you place a '|' between words, Spotlight performs an OR query. Placing a '-' before a word tells Spotlight to search for results that don't include that word, for example a NOT query.

Leopard additions

With the new version of Mac OS X, Leopard, 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 Quick Look has been added to the GUI that will display live previews of files within the search results, so applications don't 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 boolean "AND", "OR" and "NOT" operators.
   Also while Spotlight isn't enabled on the server version of Tiger, it's 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.
   In Leopard the Spotlight menu doubles as a calculator, very similar to the functionality of the Google search field (but without the need to be online).

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