Spotlight is Apple's system-wide desktop search feature found within Mac OS X. The feature was introduced in OS X 10.4 (Tiger) on April 29, 2005, aimed at providing a quick-locate option for all files on a Mac. While Apple's cleverly designed Spotlight even gives the dictionary definition of pretty much anything you are searching on the computer, it also acts as a calculator, much like the Google search field, only you don't need the Internet to get the result of an equation.

Spotlight was first and foremost designed to allow the user to quickly locate a wide variety of items on the computer. This includes everything from documents, pictures, music, applications to System Preferences and even specific words in documents. It does a great job at narrowing down searches using creation dates, modification dates, sizes, types and other criteria.

Have a look at the example to the left. As you can see, by merely typing the word "image", Spotlight managed to display the preview of everything connected to or containing this word (applications, documents, folders, messages, images, PDFs, web pages, music, etc.), as well as the dictionary definition of the word. Best of all, Spotlight can be invoked through a simple keyboard shortcut that is very easy to remember and use (CMD + Space Bar).

Even though Spotlight proved to be a success, Apple felt it could add even more functionality to the blue search bar - an instant calculator! An example is available below.



Better yet, why don't you try it out yourself right now?

With the release of Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard), Apple introduced more than just one new feature to Spotlight. Unlike in Tiger, where users could only search devices that were attached to their computers, Leopard's Spotlight is able to search networked Macs running Leopard (both client and server versions) that have file sharing enabled. A feature called Quick Look has been added to the GUI that will display live previews of files within the search results, so applications do not have to be opened just to confirm that the user has found the right file. Also, the syntax has been extended to include support for Boolean "AND", "OR" and "NOT" operators. Additionally, while Spotlight in Tiger had a unique and separate window design, Spotlight in Leopard now shares windows with the Finder, allowing for a more unified GUI.