Spotlight

Spotlight
Spotlight is Mac’s innate search engine. To invoke Spotlight, all you need to do is click on the magnifying glass icon in the top-right corner. Spotlight searches and returns the results in real time.
When idle, it will index the entire computer; the process is represented by a dot in the center of Spotlight’s magnifying glass icon. During this time, your Mac may seem to respond sluggishly but rest assured that it is only temporary until the process of indexing is complete.
Spotlight will also start to index if there is a sudden influx of new files. Although you may hear whirring noises, this is absolutely normal -- it takes additional CPU power to index a lot of files and the fan will kick in to cool down your Mac.

Quick Tip
To bring up the Spotlight search field, press Command + Space.

Using Spotlight
Spotlight is a great way to search for files quickly. Besides that, Spotlight will also find Address Book contacts, iCal events, search through emails, PDFs, media files and applications. As long as you have a rough idea of what to look for, type in a search term and watch as the results come to life and narrow down to your possible target files.

Spotlight categorizes search results based on file type. If you prefer not to have Spotlight show certain types of files or locations, you can easily set this in Spotlight’s Preferences.
(System Preferences -> Spotlight)

In the ‘Search Results’ tab, you may customize the results by order of appearance and even choose not to display results from certain applications.
In the ‘Privacy’ tab, you may enter locations where you do not want Spotlight to search. To add a location, press the plus button and browse to the location you want to keep private.

Advanced Searching
Searching for filenames may be sufficient for most people but Spotlight is innately so powerful that it would be a shame not to share these advanced searching tips.
The tips that follow have not been documented by Apple and are therefore incomplete.
Searching for a specific filetype
Using the syntax kind:, it is possible to narrow the search specifically to images, music, PDF, Word documents, Pages documents, text, bookmarks, history, mail, ZIP files, etc.
For example, to quickly find my Summer ’09 PDF amongst all the mail I have with the same title, all I need to enter is ‘kind:pdf summer’ and Spotlight would have found the file for me.
Search by metadata
All files store metadata -- simple file descriptions embedded into them but not clearly stated in the file name. For example, a Composer or Artist name are metadata that Spotlight can effortlessly search for.
Let’s say I want to play a song from John Mayer’s ‘Heavier Things’ album. All I need to do is invoke Spotlight by pressing Cmd + Spacebar and enter ‘album:heavier things’

If I wanted to search for all the songs in my library by Bach, I’d simple enter ‘composer:bach’

There are heaps of other metadata search syntaxes that are available but again, they’re not documented so finding out about them is more or less a game of trial and error.
Here are a few more syntaxes:
bitrate: Bit Rate
by: Song Artist
codec: Media Codec
composer: Song Composer
genre: Genre
height: Image height in pixels
width: image width in pixels
ISO: Image ISO
aperture: Image aperture
to: Recipient
from: Sender
subject: Mail Subject
date:mm/dd/yyyy Date sent or received

Using operators
Operators like > and < as well as - come in very handy when searching within a range of dates and other attributes.
If I needed to look for email messages received after 1st July 2009, I would enter:
kind:mail date:>7/1/2009
As you can see, multiple search syntaxes may be used in tandem to narrow down the search even further.
If you’d like to see all the images taken between 10 January 2009 and 30 March 2009, enter:
kind:image date:1/10/2009-3/30/2009

These are only a few ways to utilize the powerful search capabilities within Spotlight.

Launching Applications In Spotlight
Spotlight has seen dramatic improvements over the last few releases of OS X. In the course of that, launching applications became so much simpler.
Invoke Spotlight by pressing its hotkey, Command + Spacebar. Type the first few letters of the application you wish to launch and Spotlight would have found it for you. The more frequently you launch an application with Spotlight, the quicker it will be fetched and possibly ranked at the top.

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