[X4U] Spotlight - Searching with boolean operators

Kuestner, Bjoern Bjoern.Kuestner at drkw.com
Tue Jul 12 00:12:22 PDT 2005


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

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, I think the spaces are causing the problem: "space" as listed above is
Spotlights AND-operator.

So you're actually searching for mobyAND|ANDwalden and it seems that none of
your documents match these criteria.

Try (moby|walden) instead.

Many articles refer to Ipse dixit who were among the first to publish this
information:
http://www.hiram.nl/ipsedixit/artikel/793/boolean-search-in-spotlight

Bjorn


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