Find More Faster with Spotlight

As of Sierra, you might find yourself wondering “Should I use Spotlight or Siri when I search?” When it comes to natural language searches and the acquisition of random facts, Siri rules, but if you feel embarrassed talking to your computer at the office ① or want to launch an app or open a System Preferences pane without missing a beat, you’ll be happy to know that Spotlight still packs power.

Start a Search in Spotlight

To activate Spotlight, press Command-Space or click the magnifying glass icon in the menu bar. The Spotlight search field appears in the middle of your screen. If it’s in the way of something you’re looking at, simply drag it to a new location.

Type your search term to begin.

Preview Your Results

As you type, Spotlight guesses what you seek. You might have to type only a few characters before hits appear in the left-hand list below the search field, divided by category. Select one with your arrow keys or pointer.

Select a search result, and a preview appears in the pane to the right ②. In some cases, you can play a song or watch a video without launching the parent app. For example, Apple Music content launches in iTunes, but a song you have stored locally plays without launching a thing.

In the past, you could also page through a PDF in Spotlight’s preview pane, but now only an image of the first page shows. You can scroll through Keynote presentations and Pages documents.

Search Using Natural Language

Save time and effort searching with Spotlight by using natural language. What does that mean? Instead of plugging criteria into a Finder search (choose File > Find or press Command-F), you can do fairly complex searches by typing a query that more closely resembles the way you’d speak.

Say you want to find a presentation you created on Saturday. Type presentation from Saturday in Spotlight ③.

Looking for an email from your buddy, Suki, that—by the way—includes an attachment? Type email from Suki with attachment and you’re done ④.

When Natural Language Doesn’t Come Naturally

Despite this feature’s power to simplify complicated searches, you’ll probably find yourself surprised by aspects of using it that seem downright unnatural. Sometimes phrase-based searches work and sometimes they don’t.

Type what’s the weather? and you’re likely to see your city’s 10-day forecast. But, type What's Apple's stock price today? (with or without the question mark) and you’ll get the Spotlight equivalent of a blank stare. If this happens to you, rephrase your request more simply—Apple stock price—and you’re more likely to get the information you need.

All that’s to say: Keep it simple and be prepared to experiment with phrasing. If that doesn’t work, try Siri.

What Can You Find?

Sierra’s Spotlight lets you find many types of information on your Mac and on the Web. Here are some of the highlights:

• Applications: Spotlight has always been able to act like a simple application launcher. For instance, start to type keychain and the app appears as the top hit after just a few letters ⑤. Press Return to launch it.

  

  This saves you from digging around in the Applications folder—especially if the app is nested in a folder, as are Keychain Access, Disk Utility, and many other tools.

• Bookmarks and history: Bookmarked sites and Web pages that you’ve looked at recently in Safari will also appear in Spotlight results.
• Contacts: Spotlight finds contact information quickly and easily. Click an icon under the contact’s name to make a call or send an email message ⑥. Hover over the address and then click the pin icon that appears to look up an address in Maps.

• Currency and unit conversions: For those times when you need to substitute kilometers for miles or liters for quarts, there’s no need to head to Google or your dog-eared copy of Joy of Cooking. Just type in the Spotlight search field—say, 3 1/2 cups or 3,000 miles—and Spotlight shows common conversions.
• Files of many types: Spotlight lets you search for files on your startup drive and any attached drives. The preview pane helps you make sure you have the right one.

  Once you’ve found what you want, launch it in its default app by pressing Return. (You can tell what the default app is by the icon that appears at the top right of the Spotlight window.)

• iTunes and iBooks Store results: Results include music, movie, and TV shows matching your term in the iTunes Store as well as your iTunes library. You can also buy or rent movies from iTunes in the preview pane ⑦. (Matches in the iBooks store may appear, too, although this happens less frequently.) Press Return to open a store to that entry.

• Movie showtimes: Search for Movie Showtimes to see nearby flicks and times under the Now Playing in Theaters header. Type in a movie’s name and look for hits under the Movies or Now Playing in Theaters header to see showtimes and its Rotten Tomatoes rating, as well as links to trailers.

• Sports: El Capitan brought quick sports information to Spotlight—including stats, schedules, and scores—and that capability is still in Sierra. You’ll have the greatest success with men’s professional football, baseball, basketball, hockey, and soccer. Look for Stephen Curry and the Golden State Warrior’s stats appear ⑧.

  

  Or, type Manchester United for scores from the team’s latest game ⑨.

  

  Men’s football is the only college sport Spotlight Sports covers so far. You might need to experiment to get a team’s name right. For instance, Crimson Tide doesn’t work, but Alabama Crimson Tide does.

  As for women’s sports, the WNBA is represented—search for Seattle Storm and you’ll see scores. Spotlight doesn’t include any player stats and leaves out women’s pro soccer as well as all women’s college sports.

  Lovers of tennis, golf, and other noble sports will be vexed to find their favorites overlooked, too.

• Stocks: Type in the ticker symbol (for example, AAPL for Apple) to see the latest stock prices ⑩.

• System Preferences: A fast way to open a particular System Preferences pane is to start typing its name in Spotlight. For example, start typing Privacy and the Security & Privacy preferences pane quickly appears as the top hit. Press Return and you’re there.
• Quick definitions: When you’re not sure you have the right word, spare yourself the trouble of opening the Dictionary app (or embarrassing yourself). Type a term—for example, crampon or kerfuffle—into Spotlight and select the Definition header. Dictionary results appear in the Preview pane ⑪.

• Weather: Type my weather to see forecasts based on your location. To see weather conditions elsewhere, type in a statement like weather in Sonora.
• Web video: You can search for video on YouTube and Vimeo directly from Spotlight. Type a query like iPhone 7 and look for the Web Video header in results list.
• Wikipedia entries: For better or for worse, Wikipedia is often the first stop for many of us when we’re looking for an answer to a simple question. Spotlight shows summaries of Wikipedia pages in the preview pane. Press Return to open the full page in Safari.

Find (Just) Files Faster

To find a file without being distracted by Web results, press Command-Option-Space bar to open a regular Finder search window. If you’re in the Finder, you can also press Command-F instead.

Omit Types of Results

It’s great that Spotlight can return so many different results, but what if it’s all too much?

Go to System Preferences > Spotlight > Search Results and take a look at the categories. If you know you’ll never want to see a certain type of result—for instance, it’s likely you don’t often need to search for fonts—uncheck the checkbox next to that category.

Exclude Files from Spotlight

You might not have a problem with Spotlight finding documents in general, but have a very big problem with it finding particular documents on your drive. Whether it’s super-secret files, naughty love letters, or the redundant contents of a backup drive, you can exclude these files from Spotlight altogether.

Go to System Preferences > Spotlight > Privacy. Drag a folder or disk onto the window, or click the plus button and navigate to the item.

Consider Spotlight Suggestions and Privacy

Speaking of privacy, how does Spotlight get you all that nifty information about local weather, movie showtimes, and nearby restaurants anyway? When you send a query, the query—as well as the location of your Mac at that time—is sent back to Apple. Apple then uses that information to help generate results to match. Your Mac also lets Apple know what search result you pick.

If that doesn’t bother you, carry on. If you need a little more information to decide whether it bothers you, go to System Preferences > Spotlight > Search Results and click the About Spotlight Suggestions & Privacy button.

If you’ve got the heebie-jeebies just thinking about this, deselect the Allow Spotlight Suggestions in Spotlight and Look Up checkbox ⑭.