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10.4: Limit Spotlight searches to filenames only
Authored by: elmimmo on Jul 21, '05 08:04:30AM

Arg, gosh, do I hate Spotlight. The concept is nice, the implementation, pathetic. Everytime I learn a new "trick" I find another place where Spotlight is broken: I have PLENTY of numbered folders called "Unidad 2", "Unidad 3", "Unidad 4" and so on.

Can somebody explain my WHY typing, with quotes, "Unid" or "Unida" finds NONE, while "Unidad" returns all of them? I even get some files that do not have the string in the filename and that have no keyword assigned for all three strings, just different, also seemingly unrelated, ones that non-quoted searches insists in returning… and I am indeed talking about Spotlight, not the Finder's search (and why those are two different things, beats me).

I think someone had quite a hard time in figuring a broken algorithm for searching inside words. Because I cannot think of an easy one that would behave like Spotlight does in this case. Has someone at Apple ever used this P.O.S.?



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10.4: Limit Spotlight searches to filenames only
Authored by: sjonke on Jul 21, '05 09:01:11AM

As I said below, currently this trick only reliably finds whole words. Apple doesn't advertise this feature, and this is no doubt why. I don't think you'll find any documentation anywhere saying you can do it. It might even just be a fluke that it behaves the way that it does. Some artifact of the search engine.

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10.4: Limit Spotlight searches to filenames only
Authored by: kmacdonald on Jul 23, '05 02:45:51PM

I think the key here is that Spotlight starts searching as soon as you start typing. So, if you want to find all files with the words "test" and "tested" and "tester" for example, type "test

This open-ended search seems to recognize by the first quotation mark that you want to only search file names. This issue has been driving me up the wall but since I tried the open ended quote it's worked fine. I just discovered this today so I haven't given it a real thorough testing but so far so good!



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