I have a love-hate relationship with Spotlight, OS X’s convenient and useful, but immensely frustrating search utility. Apple introduced Spotlight with OS X 10.4 Tiger, and tweaked it considerably in OS 10.5 Leopard.
Having a search engine ready and waiting all the time is seductive, and Spotlight is nice to have, but falls short of Apple’s “Find anything, anywhere, fast” claim, and I particularly dislike its find-as-you-type initiating searches from the first keystroke. I was told I wouldn’t mind any more once I got an Intel Mac. Well, I now have a Core 2 Duo and still mind.
“Too Much Information”
Spotlight is also afflicted with a Google-esque “too much information” syndrome, even with a fair bit of my hard drive’s contents excluded from indexing. It also doesn’t do simple file name searches.
No path information is revealed in Spotlight’s results window. You must resort to Get Info or Reveal in Finder. No preview of file contents either, you can’t refine your search within results, and Spotlight doesn’t support phrase searches, at least not conveniently and efficiently. You can muck around using quotation marks in the search field, but I’ve had indifferent success with that.
Some have praised the changes in Leopard Spotlight, but I actually think I preferred Spotlight in Tiger, with its readout of the number of search returns and, in my opinion, more convenient and functional “Show All” panel.
Some Alternatives
In a recent article, MacFixIt cites some of these Spotlight shortcomings and proposes alternatives like Google Desktop, Easy Find, Foxtrot, and even Command-line searching.
I’ve tried Google Desktop and find it just too ponderous, resource-hogging, and overbearing. Devon Technologies’ Easy Find is a nice little app, free like Google Desktop, but more hassle to use than Spotlight, and not being indexed — slower. I can’t comment on CTM Development’s 29 Euro Foxtrot utility as I haven’t used it. The Command-line is largely terra incognita for me — not a place I want to go for quick searches in any case.
Where I do go mostly is to SpotInside, a Spotlight-enhancer that layers several elements on top of the Spotlight engine: results preview in the interface window, decently efficient phrase searching, much more conveniently configurable and sortable results organization, searches within results, and searching doesn’t commence before you bid it to.
Well Worth the Effort
SpotInside is yet another application to run, but it starts up almost instantly, is fast, and adds little system overhead. With such a well-conceived and convenient interface, it’s well worth the extra effort.
Unlike Spotlight and Leopard’s Quick Look, SpotInside can use the Find panel and select text in your search result. It also conveniently highlights your keywords in search results. It doesn’t search as extensive a range of file types as Spotlight (eg: music files and email messages), but I’d argue that’s a good thing. For finding words or phrases within text files, PDFs and the like, it’s the best tool I’ve tried.
SpotInside searches ever major text document format (including Pages). It can display PDF previews as images or as plain text, and will also find the folder the desired document is located in with a click of the “Reveal in Finder” button, and open it with the “Launch” button. There is a Zoom slider for adjusting the size of the preview contents.
I haven’t found another desktop search engine that has the uncanny ability to efficiently and quickly zero in on just what I’m looking for, as SpotInside does. If you’re frustrated with Spotlight, or even if you’re not, SpotInside is worth checking out.
SpotInside requires OS X 10.4 or later, and is free.
