Why does the Spotlight Search Suck?

I'm serious I don't know if the most recent update did this or something but Seaching for anything ***** on this.

For an example of why its terrible let me share the troubles I was having today. I was trying to find an old paper I wrote a while back. I couldn't remember the name of it but I remembered the topic which was about sensory issues. So I typed Sensory into the search bar and the I got like 1 or 2 word documents and a bunch of unrelated files.

As another test I put in my Name into the search engine... and found out how to make it only find word documents. I found 12 files at most. I haven't thrown away any past school work for a long time so either I've only put my name on 12 different assignments ever or this search engine doesn't work.

On and by the way I did end up finding the document later. It in fact did contain both my name and the word sensory. I'm just frustrated that this search engine doesn't work. Am I doing something wrong? Is there a reason that it can't find documents that contain words? Can someone explain this to me?

Posted on Feb 10, 2016 10:40 AM

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8 replies

Jun 26, 2017 3:10 PM in response to MilesDaFoo

I have no idea dude. Mac is f****ing ******** when it comes to this stuff. It's surprising basic--i mean OSes have been doing this for decades now and they can't seem to implement a simple file search on their operating system. It's scary. And quite telling, imo.


Anyhow, go to the mac store, and search "easyfind." It's a free file search system and works waaaaaay better than spotlight/finder ! ! ! : )

Jun 26, 2017 8:00 PM in response to MilesDaFoo

It should find words in documents. That's what it is all about.


Maybe you need to re-index spotlight.

How to rebuild the Spotlight index on your Mac - Apple Support


http://osxdaily.com/2012/01/17/rebuild-spotlight-index/


There are search apps to scan files for words without an index. They are slow.


if you are into the /applications/utilities/terminal

I use these commands for finding things.

find / -iname 'python*'

find -x ~/Desktop/iMac -type f -exec grep -il "" {} \;

find -x ~ -iname "*.jpeg" -type f -exec ls -l {} \; 2>/dev/null | sort -r -k 8,8 -k 6,7M

find -x ~ \( -iname "*.jpeg" -o -iname "*.png" \) -type f -exec ls -l {} \;

Jun 28, 2017 6:31 AM in response to rccharles

rccharles wrote:


Once upon a time 10.2 or 10.3, search worked like Find Any File. I thought it was great.


R

And is 2002 the size of the disk to search and the number of files to search was much smaller than the multiple terabytes of files we have today 🙂


If we keep going back in time, we will eventually get back to punched paper tape capacities

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Why does the Spotlight Search Suck?

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