[X4U] Spotlight - Searching For An Exact String

[Kirk McElhearn]

On Jul 12, 2005, at 2:33 AM, Randy B.Singer wrote:

> It is as yet undocumented by Apple, but you can indeed do Boolean
> searches with Spotlight.
>
>
> (-...) = NOT
> |      = OR
> space  = AND

It's undocumented because it doesn't work. I've been writing a lot  
about Spotlight, and was interested when I saw this stuff on the web.  
I contacted someone at Apple who handles Spotlight, and he said that  
this sort of gives the kind of hits you describe sometimes, but this  
is not how it works.

I just did, for example, a search for:

moby | walden

I have several electronic copies of Walden on my computer, which I  
use for searching and examples in books and articles. It found moby  
alone (a recent article I wrote about Melville) but when I ran the  
above search, found nothing.
If I search walden alone, it finds more than 100 hits.

The AND works, because, by default, all Spotlight searches (other  
than those in quotes) are AND searches.


Kirk
           Author of: The Mac OS X Command Line: Unix Under the Hood
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