Ask MetaFilter questions tagged with spotlight

How do I clean up Spotlight search results

jeffreyclong — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 15:43:47 -0800

How do I clean up search results in Mac OS X Spotlight Shell scripts, Objective C source files, html document files, c header source files all pollute my search results in Spotlight. Is there any way to tell spotlight to stop giving me those results?

How to get Spotlight to stick to the folder it's in

Kosh — Sun, 15 Mar 2009 10:15:23 -0800

OS X Spotlight annoyance question: how to get Spotlight to stick to the folder it's in? Since the advent of Leopard I've come to use Spotlight a lot more to easily find information on my computer, and I love it. There is one annoyance that keeps nagging at me, though: when I have a specific folder open and I type something in the search bar for that folder, Spotlight defaults to searching the entire computer and I have to click another button to make it search the folder only. Is there any way to change this behavior to make it default to the folder you're in if you search from within a Finder window (the little search bar in the upper-right corner of Finder windows, NOT the main Spotlight search on the menu bar)?

This behavior seems counterintuitive to me (if I wanted to search the whole computer instead of just the folder I was in, wouldn't I just use the main Spotlight bar on the menu bar?) and I'd like to change it if possible, but havent been able to find anything in the preferences. Googling just finds more people with the same gripe I have (some results going back to '07 with no answers, which doesn't bode well for a positive answer to this question, but I figured I'd try...)

This is OS X 10.5.6 for what it's worth.

Can Spotlight index websites?

Chris4d — Fri, 06 Mar 2009 23:56:02 -0800

Can Spotlight index websites? I have a mediawiki install on my macbook that I would like Spotlight to index, but more generally, I would like a Spotlight plugin that can index arbitrary URLs, local or WAN (wouldn't it be cool to have wikipedia results show up in spotlight?). Google has not been helpful in finding this. I do have a plugin that downloads delicious bookmarks which suggests my idea should be feasible, but I'm not a programmer and I don't want to start tearing apart the delicious plugin to see how it works. Anyone have a suggestion? If spotlight can't do this, I would be open to alternative approaches.

Firefox and Spotlight on the Mac

monkey85 — Sat, 29 Nov 2008 20:52:01 -0800

How can I set up my Mac to search Firefox history with Spotlight? I'm running Leopard, and Spotlight has a great ability to search through my browser history to find a web page...at least, through anything I've surfed using Safari. Is there any way to include Firefox's history in the searches?

I'd be willing to settle for creative ideas like transferring history files automatically on a schedule with a shell script.

Thanks!

Will Firefox 3.0 finally allow inline viewing of pdf's on an intel mac?

ericbop — Tue, 17 Jun 2008 10:31:59 -0800

Yippee - Firefox 3.0 has landed. Will this solve the most glaring problem with Firefox 2.x - unlike native Mac app Safari, Firefox can't load pdf's inline. One separate question: The other feature I love about Safari is how well spotlight handles indexing and searching web pages saved using Safari. What's the best way to archive web pages using Firefox so that I can find them with spotlight? I love Scrapbook, but spotlight doesn't.

OS X hangs on Spotlight

Wild_Eep — Wed, 07 Nov 2007 06:55:49 -0800

My mac hangs at login, showing only the blue desktop pattern and the spotlight icon in the upper right, but no menus, no icons on the desktop. Mac Mini, MacOS X 10.4.10. Network Home Directories. Every once in a while, someone gets a situation where the OS hangs with the spotlight icon in the upper right. This happens nearly immediately after logging into their network home. Network is switched gigabit copper.

I can boot to single-user mode, but I can't boot to 'safe mode' for some reason.
I can fully login to a local 'administrative' user with no symptoms.

a 'fsck -yf' scan produces nothing to itself to fix.

are spotlight databases stored 'per-user' or 'per computer'? What about spotlight preferences?

Does anyone know how to deal with frozen barber-pole Spotlight indexing in Mac OS X Leopard?

MiguelCardoso — Wed, 31 Oct 2007 11:57:11 -0800

Will the Spotlight indexing on my Leopard update never end? It's been on blue barber pole for 12 hours now and it's dragging everything with it. What can I do? Thank you for taking an interest! Last night, I slid a brand new shop-bought Mac OS X Leopard into my old-model 24-inch iMac, updating from Tiger. Everything went well but after 3 or 4 hours Spotlight was still indexing away, about a quarter of the way down the blue pole, indicating the usual estimate of 543000 hours to go. Today it's been going for another 9 hours and worse: there is no longer any progress line, just a stripey barber pole thingy.

Possibly useful information for any kind heart: the mdworker on the Activity Monitor swings between 30 and 70; my Active RAM is around 1.16 GB; I only have about 300 GB on my 500 GB hard drive; I've disconnected my external hard drives (didn't make any difference) and tried rebooting and disconnecting for a few minutes. Otherwise, everything seems to be working - but very, very slowly.

Any ideas? I did get through to Apple support and was sent Capture Data software (which has been dragging for 2 hours now), which I'm to mail back to them. The guy I spoke too was very nice but I was his first Leopard complaint so he hadn't heard of indexing problems. Needless to say, any help will be much appreciated!

My Spotlight won't shine on me

DiscourseMarker — Thu, 14 Jun 2007 22:12:32 -0800

How can I search for specific strings of text within multiple individual text files in Mac OSX 10.4? I am trying to search within a very large corpus of text files to look for specific strings of text. One problem is that I don't have all the text files in one folder; there are 150 main folders, and in each of those 150 are on average 25-30 sub-folders, inside which are any number of text files. (note-the data was organized this way when I received it, so it's not my fault!)

I had this idea that Spotlight in Tiger was supposed to make this all very easy, but somehow I can't get it to work. Ideally what I'd like would be for it to look through all the documents in the main folder and return the ones containing the text string, but I'd even settle for going folder-by-folder, as long as I don't have to search each individual file. But I've tried everything, including telling it to search the contents of one specific file that I had already identified as containing the search string, and I still got zero results.

Tell me, oh hive mind, what stupid obvious thing have I somehow forgotten to do?

Stop Mac's Spotlight from indexing!

phyrewerx — Thu, 14 Dec 2006 23:37:07 -0800

Please! Stop the Mac OSX Spotlight from indexing. My friend's Spotlight has been unavailable for the last day. Everytime we click on it, a message pops up stating that the -computer- is being indexed. The estimates on when it's done varies from 4 minutes to 50 hours until indexing is complete (but it lies!).

The machine is a Macbook Duo. We applied a security patch yesterday from Apple. It has OSX 10.4.8. We tried mdutil to erase the index, restart the index via terminal, tried to put the root drive under 'privacy', tried rebooting and fix the permissions. Nothing works.

We attached a firewire drive to the machine and a Spotlight search on that is fine (we disabled root drive indexing by setting the drive to 'privacy' mode). Otherwise, index ad infinitum.

Spotlight on OS X isn't finding everything

badstone — Thu, 16 Feb 2006 11:42:10 -0800

Something is badly broken in the search on my Mac. It can't find ANY zip or rar files, and it doesn't necessarily find everything matching a given query. E.g. - if I search for "pink", it finds one of 3 Pink Floyd folders and it only finds Pink Floyd tracks within one of those three folders, though a different one than the actualy folder it found! Can/should Spotlight be re-indexed? Are there any hacks to roll back to the old search? Should I just go with a 3rd party search app?

Spotlight vs. Launchbar in OS X 10.4.2?

cahlers — Wed, 28 Sep 2005 17:58:47 -0800

Spotlight vs. Launchbar in OS X 10.4.2? I'm currently using Spotlight in OS X. It finds files relatively well. Do you feel there is there an advantage to switching to Launchbar, and if so, why do you like it better?

Why is Spotlight a bit dim?

words1 — Mon, 26 Sep 2005 15:06:55 -0800

Spotlight in OS X 10.4 -- doesn't seem to index the actual contents of files and emails. Searching for known terms produces no hits. Mac Mini, 3 mos. old. Any ideas?