No matter how good a “filing system” you have on your Mac, and no matter how disciplined you are at having a place for everything and everything in its place, you’re eventually going to accumulate enough files in enough places to need to search for something.

The ability to search a computer has certainly evolved from the early days, when the only file attribute you could search for was the file name.  And even that took a very long time.  With the advent of more powerful computers and file systems came the ability to actually search within files for specific content.  Instead of having to recall a document’s name, like “Letter to Santa”, you could search for something else you remembered in the body of the Letter to Santa, like “sled” or “puppy” or “Xbox 360 with Halo 3 and Guitar Player 3”.  You get the point.

Way back (in technology years) in April of 2005, Apple introduced “Spotlight” in Mac OS 10.4 “Tiger”.  Spotlight was the first really robust search tool to be fully integrated into an operating system.  Almost two years later Microsoft finally built a similar search tool into Windows Vista, although it wasn’t (and isn’t) as robust as Spotlight.  Recently the search bar has been raised again, as Apple’s new Mac OS 10.5 “Leopard” adds some nice new capabilities and refinements to Spotlight.

Here’s how Spotlight works.  When you start up your Mac for the first time, Spotlight begins “indexing” your Mac.  It creates, for lack of a better word, a database of information about the files on your Mac.  Not just the file’s names, but the actual contents of the files as well.  And, when a new file is created or added, or an existing file is modified, Spotlight immediately indexes the file.  No waiting around until your computer is less busy or for the middle of the night sometime.  Immediately.

For example, I’m writing this article using Microsoft Word.  I finish writing it, and save it.  In the time it takes me to click on the Spotlight icon and type in some word I used in the document, the file has already been indexed and the document containing the article shows up in the search results.  It’s that fast.

To “invoke” Spotlight, you can click the Spotlight icon (a small magnifying glass, fittingly) in the Menu Bar, or simply hit Command – Space Bar on the keyboard.  A search field appears below the Spotlight icon in the Menu Bar.  Type in what you’re looking for and an ordered list appears below, with results pouring in even before you can finish typing.  You can select “Show All”, and a Finder window opens containing a list of all matches.  From there you can use Leopard’s excellent Quick Look feature to peruse each document.

Say I search for the word “Player”.  Of course, I find this document.  But the Top Hit in the list is QuickTime Player, and in Leopard Spotlight, that selection is highlighted, ready for me to hit the Return key and open QuickTime Player.  Although it’s not the most efficient application launcher on the Mac, it works.

The second “hit” is the definition of “Player” in the Mac’s built-in Dictionary/Thesaurus.  Then there are hits separated into categories: Applications, Documents, Folders, Email messages in Apple Mail, Images, PDF Documents, Music, Movies, Presentations, Calendar Events, Contacts, System Preferences, and Fonts.

Plus, if one of my “Player” hits is a PDF file, and I select it, Spotlight takes me to that file, opens it, and highlights the first occurrence of “Player”, as well as providing a list of every other page in the document containing the word “Player”.