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Be careful when using the Finder to do Content Searches.
Authored by: iRideSnow on Jan 18, '05 11:08:45PM

The Finder's Content Search will only find "whole" words. For example, if you used the word 'filename' in a chat session, and you search for 'file', it won't find the chat session where you used 'filename' (unless it also contains the word 'file', of course).

Your search word has to be recognized as a separate word in order for the Content Search to work. This means that your search word has to be delimited by some character other than a normal alphabetic (and perhaps numeric) character, such as a space or an underscore or whatever.

This applies to a Content Searches of any files, not just chat sessions, of course.

I filed a bug about this a long time ago and it looks like it will be fixed in the next release of OS X (Tiger). Hopefully, they will provide the option of searching for whole words OR substrings, since both types of searches are useful.

Rob



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