Your friendly neighborhood Kirk McElhearn has some tips to offer you for getting the most out of Spotlight. Unlike under Tiger, Leopard’s version of Spotlight is actually useable, but just because you’re typing strings into the Spotlight field doesn’t mean you’re taking advantage of everything that OS X’s search functionality has to offer.
Kirk points you towards the useful special keywords that let you power search right from the Spotlight field. For example, typing date:today will show you all the files that have been last modified today. You can also combine that with additional operators: for example date:>11/01/07 will show you any files modified after the 1st of November of this year.
There’s also a kind keyword, which allows you to limit your results by what type of file you’re looking for. Entering kind:pages for example, will show you all Pages documents. Better yet, you can use Boolean operators to combine the above, for example: date:yesterday AND kind:pages will show you every Pages document you modified yesterday.
That’s just the barest hint of what Spotlight lets you do. Additional keywords let you search for things by things like bitrate, ISO, codec, and comments too. Several of these criteria are available via the Finder search’s Other option that we’ve mentioned before, but it’s good to know you can fire those up directly from Spotlight’s search field if you so choose.
Now, if they implement RegEx parsing, it would really appeal to the geek in me.