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First off, I dislike its find-as-you-type initiating searches from the first letter you type. This is distracting, and bogs things down on the slower Macs I use. It is dismal for simple file name searches, much less convenient than the Find dialog in OS 10.3 Panther. Why no simple ‘find by name’ option?
There no path information revealed in the Spotlight Results window. You have to resort to Get Info or Reveal in Finder. There is no preview of file contents available, and you can't refine your search within results, which is a pain, because Spotlight suffers from a bad Google-esque, "too much information" and "not precise enough information" syndromes - not about the location or contents of files, but the vast number of returns it gives in a typical search. There is no indication of whether a document found in a Spotlight search contains one mention of the word you're looking for or a hundred instances. Spotlight search results are listed and sorted by name, file-type or modification date only.
You can do Boolean searches with Spotlight, but the method necessary is not intuitive, and uses somewhat nonstandard syntax. You can find out more about that in this article (scroll down):
http://www.macintouch.com/tigerreview/spotlight.html
Spotlight doesn't support phrase searches, so if that's the key you need to find what you're looking for, you're out of luck - almost. You can muck around with using quotation marks in the search field. I've had indifferent success with that. A simple ‘match this phrase’ configuration button would be so much simpler.
There are now a gaggle of Spotlight enhancer applications, most of them shareware or demoware, but for some reason, I'm not sure exactly why, SpotInside, a nice little freeware utility that addresses some of Spotlight's deficiencies, tends to turn up the most useful collection of results for my purposes, and displays them in a very convenient fashion most notably ranking returns in order of relevance (ie: frequency with which the searched-for word(s) appear(s), and even better - providing a full preview of the contents. You can copy and paste from the contents preview, but the displayed contents are not editable.
Most of the time, I find Spotinside the most helpful Spotlight enhancer tool for the sort of content searching I do, and version 0.7.1 is the best iteration yet. If Apple would only make Spotlight work like this.
I've been using Spotinside for nearly a year now, but version 0.7.1 was just released on the weekend, with a new, three-pane user interface. I was very happy with the old interface, but no features have been removed, and the panes of the new one are resizable, so it's fine by me. The new, third pane is a Source and History list, which replaces a slide-out Cocoa drawer in previous versions in which you could add bookmarks to search results you might want to return to.
Actually, there is also a fourth pane of sorts in the form of an extended details option in the top panel that displays your search's Keywords, Scope, Query string, and Format string.
Other new stuff in version 0.7 are a new sdd folder, smart folder, etc capability in the "Source" pane, and you can now search files from the selected source by text contents. Also new is the TagBot tagging feature; you can click the TagBot tag in the source pane to search files having the tag, and drop files from Finder or the find result table onto the tag to add the tag.TagBot tagging is an unofficial function in Spotinside. See http://bigrobotsoftware.com/ for more information about TagBot. The downsides of the new version are that the interface window is somewhat bigger, complexity is creeping in, and my gut tells me that it's not quite as quick as the older versions were.
SpotInside searches rtd, rtfd, html, doc, PDF(text), OpenDocument Format(text) documents and shows a preview their contents with keywords highlighted. It 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 even a Zoom slider for adjusting the font point size of the preview contents in the right hand pane of the interface window.
And happily, your search is not launched until you finish typing your keyword or phrase and click the "Search" button. Spotinside works very nicely.
In the Spotinside Preferences, you can set the number of returns displayed in the Source pane's History Count, while the Preferences View panel lets you set parameters like horizontal or vertical orientation, a highlight and find by word option, which, when activated, displays the various words and phrases of your search string in color highlights. You can also specify whether to preview PDFs as PDFs or as plain text. By turning "Highlight and find by word" on in the Preferences panel, each word that comprises the query sting is highighted and revealed by pressing ?G. For example, when searching "Abc Def", the words "abc" and "def" are highlighted in different colors respectively
If you're looking for a somewhat more flexible, configurable, and informative Spotlight-type function, Spotinside is well worth checking out.
New in version 0.7.2:
• Added new options to Preferences panel
• New Metadata panel
• Enabled editing query in history items
• Improved stability
New in version 0.7:1
• Brand new yet-another-three-pane-document-managing-software style UI
• Add folder, smart folder, etc to "Source" pane. You can search files from the selected source by text contents.
• New TagBot tagging feature. Click TagBot tag in the source pane to search files having the tag. Drop files from Finder or the find result table onto the tag to add the tag.
System requirements:
Mac OS X 10.4 or later.
System Support:
PPC/Intel
Free
For more information, visit:
http://www.oneriver.jp/SpotInside/index.html
Charles W. Moore
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