In OS X 10.4, there were a few special operators you could use to narrow your results. For instance, kind:pdf or date:tomorrow were acceptable search terms. In 10.5, the number of such operators has been greatly expanded, though there's little to no documentation on what's available.
Early on, I stumbled on the filename: syntax, which lets you quickly find by filename (use filename:"file name in quotes" for filenames with spaces in them). Macworld author Kirk McElhearn was intrigued by Spotlight's new powers, and started digging. What he discovered are some new ways to use the existing operators, as well as a slew of new operators. You can read his Spotlight's Secret Search Syntax article for all the details, but I'll hit a few highlights here.
For example, you can now use greater than, less than, or equals signs with the date operator:
date:>10/26/07
The results will be what you'd expect -- any file modified after October 26th, 2007 (and on my machine, there's a ton of those now!).
But more interesting than that are the huge variety of brand new operators and functions:
- The kind operator now supports a huge number of types. kind:word or kind:text or kind:word (to find Word documents). Kirk details a way to get a sense of the number of different options available.
- Music-related operators, such as bitrate:, codec:, and composer:.
- Photography-related operators, such as iso:, whitebalance:, and aperture:.
You can find a long list of these operators in the following file; the section of interest starts on line 312: As of now, these short names aren't documented, so this file is the only spot you'll find them. You can, of course, still use the Others pop-up to get the full names and descriptions, but the shortcuts are much quicker to use.
Update: David Pogue was kind enough to send along an excerpt of his upcoming OS X 10.5 Missing Manual on Spotlight's new advanced operators. Feel free to download and read: PDF [199KB] • Text [27KB] ... Thanks, David!
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