Spotlight Search

Spotlight is a feature that needs its own article. It’s one of the many but very important feature on your MAC. Spotlight is a system-wide desktop search feature of the MAC.

Spotlight is a selection-based search system, which creates an index of all items and files on your system. It is designed to allow the user to quickly locate a wide variety of items on on your MAC.

With Spotlight, you can find apps, documents, and other files on your MAC. And with Spotlight Suggestions, you can also get news, sports, movies, weather, Currency Conversion, Calculator, and much more.

How to access Spotlight Search?

There are multiple ways to access Spotlight search.

Method 1

Press Command (⌘) + Spacebar to launch the Spotlight Search.

Method 2

Launch Spotlight search by clicking on the Magnifying glass in the Top Menu Bar

Let’s Search with Spotlight

Launch the Spotlight using one of the 2 methods mentioned above and search for anything you’d like to find.

Spotlight does the regular search of your files on the MAC. However, that is not what I wanted to show, Spotlight is much more powerful a tool than to just be used for searching the file. Checkout what I searched –

So, I decided to search for a Gas station near me, and voilà. It not only gave the map but also the address and the website.

To open the searched item, Double click it or press Enter from your Keyboard.

You can also search by Kind or Location of the file times

For specifically searching for a file type you can use the filters while using the Spotlight. Use “Kind” for searching a specific type of file type. For e.g., Kind:audio followed by the title of the song

To locate the file on your MAC simple press Command (⌘) key. The Physical location of the file will be shown on the bottom right corner.

If you intend to open the location where the selected file is located, Press Command (⌘) + R. It shall open the File location in a Finder Window.

Spotlight can show you the weather too

I just types Weather and the location was auto picked from my Laptop and I have the Current Weather details on screen with a 10 Day forecast.

Let me now show you the Magic of Spotlight

I typed the word “Oblivion” in the Spotlight Search bar and variety of results that I got was mind blowing. I got search results that there is a Video Game called Oblivion, There is a Tom Cruise movie Oblivion(2013) plus the definition of the word Oblivion. Check out the images for yourself.