[Macworld]

Post your comments for Mac 101: Smart searching here

[Petew]

Chris, although I've been with the Mac for a long time, I never bothered getting into the smart folders, now I do! Thanks.

[Strawtag]

Now, if they would let you replace the default search criteria of the Spotlight menu bar search with the search criteria of your Smart Folder!

[fark]

Don't forget that you can option-click on the + symbol to get sub-options. You can build quite complicated searches for things like PDFs that were created within the last week and have a yellow label, but do not contain the word "temp" or "copy" in their name:

Search "This Mac"
Kind is PDF
Created date is within last 1 week
File label is yellow
None of the following are true
     Name contains temp
     Name contains copy

It may not be obvious how to get File label - that's under Other, along with many dozens of other options. The best way to find an attribute is to use the search field in the Other dialog box. It's worth a scroll through, though. It's pretty amazing what you can search on.

[quakerotis]

It still can't find my car keys.

Thanks, Chris. This is an overlooked area that is really easy to use and incredibly powerful.

[georose]

This is a great tip. The Finder is much more than what it appears to be!

[derekroff]

I'm often mystified by the number of files that Spotlight finds, which seem to have no relationship to the search term. For example, almost any Spotlight search I try brings up one or more of the PDFs from my electronic archive of Fine Woodworking magazine. Double-clicking one of the found items will open it in Preview, with the search term already in the Search field. In most cases, Preview can't find any instance of the item which Spotlight claims it contains. Spotlight searches also bring up image files with no obvious relation to the search term. Perhaps there is something in the file's meta-data, but it seems unlikely, and it isn't helpful. Is there a way to exclude meta-data from searches?

[derekroff]

Spotlight ought to help you find what you need. However, as most paragraphs of the article, and every comment, shows, users spend most of their time trying to get Spotlight to stop showing a bunch of things that they don't want.

I think we need a new search/display paradigm, which makes it much more likely that we can see the item we want in a single step, with few distracting elements. I would much rather add a few clicks and criteria to display more items, when needed, if the first search didn't show me what I want--- rather than the current system that almost always displays way too much, and requires additional clicks, menus, and criteria, to suppress display of the hundreds or thousands of files that aren't useful to me.