[X4U] Spotlight in Leopard

[Michael Winter]

On Aug 8, 2006, at 6:54 PM, Herbert Schulz wrote:

> Will Spotlight in Leopard allow me to set directories to search as  
> it allows me directories not to search in Tiger?\

What most of us think of as "Spotlight" is just the GUI front end of  
a very powerful search engine. The ability to do what you ask is  
there, it just hasn't been "activated". From what I understand,  
someone who's spent some time to learn about Spotlight and knows the  
command line could enable this.

I might also add that the "new" features in Spotlight have been there  
since the beginning (boolean searches, remote searches, etc.). I  
think the ArsTechnica review of Spotlight that came out right after  
Spotlight was released demonstrated at least the boolean search  
feature using the command line. All that was necessary was  
incorporating the feature into the GUI front-end to make the feature  
available to the masses.

To tell the truth, I was a little disappointed, because I expected a  
bunch of 3rd party apps to appear that used the search backend to do  
things Apple hadn't made available through the GUI yet. One I thought  
would pop-up would be an app that catalogued removable media. There's  
no reason someone couldn't use Spotlight to index and search that,  
just like they could catalog networked volumes.

So, getting back to the question, I don't know. But they could.

-Mike