Does spotlight search your entire computer?

I heard once that Snow Leopard only indexes and searches for all personal files. How can I get it to search for the files in the library and the program files, etc. It would be nice if there was a plugin or something that allowed you to search through the entire computer during the rare time that you need to. Also would anyone know where the domain folder is stored for iweb?

When Spotlight indexes your computer, it generates a database of all of its contents. When you do a search, it restricts what's reported. Start with http://www.pinkmutant.com/articles/Leopard/leospot.html and http://www.thexlab.com/faqs/stopspotlightindex.html To return results from everywhere, you need to add *include system files* and *visible and unvisible files* to your search criteria.

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When your in Nike plus for listening to music whuffle music can you shuffle a particular playlist or does it shuffle your entire music collection on your iPod? Williams

When in Nike plus mode to work out and listen to musi, can you shuffle a particular playlist or does it shuffle your entire music collection on your iPod? All my other iPods do this and don't want to buy a new one if the 7th generation does the same?

To be more specific - create a playlist that has only your Christmas music on it, then create a Smart playlist that has everything you want from your playlist plus one more rule, where the playist is not your Christmas playlist. Play randomly from your new smart playlist and you will be good to go.
I have a playlist with some Christian music that I don't want to have on my normal playlist - at first, I tried to have two playlists (one with the Christian stuff and one with everything else), but this ended up being easier.

Does Spotlight Search HTML Files?

I have a folder full of HTML files I just imported to my MacBook about a week ago. They have been backed up by my Time Capsule. But when I search for keywords in the contents of them, they do not show up. The file names will show up, but none of the contents (which are mainly text). I have tried to force Spotlight to search only the folder that contains the files, but it does not seem to be searching the HTML files.
Are HTML file contents excluded from Spotlight searches? I seem to have a number of webpages that come in Spotlight for keyword searches that appear to be the result of searching the file contents. So is there a trick to this? Is there some way I can force Spotlight to index this folder? Just not sure why it seems to search the contents of some HTML files and not others.

Are HTML file contents excluded from Spotlight searches?
No, HTML files are not excluded.
Open System Preferences > Spotlight, under Search Results tab is Webpages checked?
If yes, download a new html file and see if Spotlight finds it. If yes, then it could be a permissions issue with the files you imported. Do a Get Info and compare permissions between the new and old files.
You can reset your permissions on all your files similar to Disk Utility using the Recovery Drive. See instructions here:
Use OS X Recovery Disk Assistant to reset Your files and folder permissions
(Fair disclosure: NeedHelp4Mac is my site. I may receive some form of compensation, financial or otherwise, from my recommendation or link.)

Where does Spotlight search??

I have a file located in ~/Library/Favorites/. If I search (Cmd-F) for the filename Spotlight will find the file if my search starts in
~/Library/Favorites/ or
~/Library/
but not if my search starts in
~ or
"This Mac"
What's the deal? Is this some Preference that I'm missing? I tried adding ~/Library to the Spotlight System Preferences Search Results tab by dragging the folder from the Finder over there, but no go. Does Spotlight only search stuff listed here? Is there some way to add more stuff? What is the category labeled "Folders"? I read the meager Help, but it didn't.

That was helpful. Pasting the relevant information form the MacRumors forum posting by macguysoft below. Too bad spotlight makes it sooo difficult.
Step 1: Go to the Finder Search (Command + F or File > Find)
Step 2: Click on the "Kind" drop-down menu and click on other.
Note: If you don't see this pop up button, then make click on the "+" button right after Save.
Step 3: You'll see a dialog pop up and find System files. Once there, select the checkbox. Now go back to the search Window by clicking on the OK button.
Step 4 Make sure that the System files is selected in the first drop down menu. Now proceed to the Second drop down menu and select "include".
Now you can search for all your system files but don't expect for this to work with spotlight. Furthermore, you'll have to manually do this every time (only step 4 actually) you wish to search for something in your system. Hope this helps!
Message was edited by: RichardF

HT201285 What order does spotlight search display??

I know that this search displays the results by app. But within the app how are the results displayed? For example, if I typed in ok, and all my text messages that have the word ok in them pop up what order are those in if any?
Also, does anybody konw exactly how long deleted messages will appear in the spotlight search? Or how far back the search goes?

I can't be certain but they appear to be in reverse chronological order.
Old messages will appear unti lthe cache gets written over (or is deleted by restoring the phone as new).

What does spotlight search?

Sorry for the obvious question, but is there a document / thread (I tried looking) that gives a quick summary of how spotlight works and what it looks at?
I ask as it doesn't search, for me, footnotes of Word documents (which is annoying) and companies in Address Book (which is also annoying). I'm wondering if this is a problem with my computer, or standard.
Thanks!

Instead of searching directly on drives and within files, Spotlight indexes those drives and files, and searches within the index.
Therefore everything relies on Spotlight being able to keep that index complete, accurate, and up to date (to the microsecond, as you will be constantly changing files, renaming them, moving them around, etc., in normal use).
Needless to say, Spotlight fails to do that and despite the many clever and not-so-clever fixes that are sometimes suggested in these forums, the entire concept, in my opinion and in the opinion of others, is very silly, too clever for its own good, and we wonder what Apple was thinking of.
<I'm wondering if this is a problem with my computer, or standard.>
Alas, it's standard. To find the files you're looking for, more efficaciously, more quickly, and certainly more reliably, I suggest you try EasyFind as an alternative.
EasyFind is freeware and can be downloaded from here:
http://www.devon-technologies.com/products/freeware/index.html
12" PowerBook G4, G4 450 DP tower Mac OS X (10.3.9) on the Powerbook, and 10.4.2 on the G4 450

Does spotlight search notes or reminders?

With Mountain Lion newly installed. Fired up spotlight to find one of my reminders and noticed the spotlight does not seem to search the new Notes or Reminders apps. Am I missing something?

Thank you. Yes, I confirm that you are indeed right. Notes are indexed and shown in Spotlight.
Reminders are indexed and shown too. However I also note that once you have located a reminder item in Spotlight, seleting it then causes the Reminders App to attempt to re-add it, even when it is already there. Odd behaviour! I have sent feedback to Apple.

Spotlight: Search in content working on substrings

If you search for content with Spotlight, you have to type the search phrase from the beginning, i.e. searching for files containing the word homework you could search for home or homework but not for work.
Capitalization is important. So homeWork can be searched by home, homework and work but not by ork.
Does anyone know, how to create a spotlight search, that does a true search for "contains in content" working on substrings as well?
Peter

Hello JSam23,
Thanks for using Apple Support Communities.
If Spotlight isn't bringing up expected search results, you can reindex Spotlight so it knows where those files are located. Take a look at the information below on how you can do this.
I do want to forewarn you though, that reindexing Spotlight, especially your entire hard drive, can take time depending on how full the hard drive is. This can result in your computer seeming slow, or the fans running at a higher speed than normal.
From the Apple () menu, choose System Preferences.
Click Spotlight.
Click the Privacy tab.
Drag a folder or an entire volume (your hard drive) to the list.
If prompted for confirmation, click OK.
Remove the item or volume you just added to the list by clicking it and then clicking the minus ("-") button.
Close Spotlight preferences.
Spotlight will re-index the contents of the folder or volume.
Spotlight: How to re-index folders or volumes - Apple Support
Cheers,
Alex H.

Why is there no easy way to lock or passcode email on macbook pro, aside from locking entire computer or screen saver?

I have searched Support for answers to this but many similar questions seem to go unanswered. Why is it not possible for Apple to provide a simple way to lock and unlock email on the mac so that others don't have access to it and apps can't access email and contacts. With all the concerns for privacy these days, it seems we should be able to deny access to our email and contact lists with advanced and easy privacy settings. Especially if family members or friends have access to the computer, there should be a better way to just close and password protect or lock access easily without having to log off and on as a different user? Thanks. This seems to have been a recurring question for years!

Not just your email, but all your other files as well -- your entire computer can be protected by setting an option in:
System Preferences > Security ...
... require password after: immediately after sleep or screensaver begins (and you can choose longer time settings off a list as you wish).
When you come back to your Mac, the screensaver does not yield until you enter your password.
Mac OS X 10.6: Locking your computer screen

Spotlight search on iPhone 5 not going to selected text message

Hi all,
I'm having a problem with my new iPhone 5 and the Spotlight search when looking for text messages.
When searching for old texts the phone doesn't go to the specific message it has found, instead it only goes to the most recent message the relevant sender has sent.
My old 4 used to go to the specific message searched for. Has this feature been disabled on the 5 or is it just a fault? A friend of mine with a 5 also has this issue.
Thanks in advance for your help!
Matt

When you "delete" some kinds of items from the iPhone, they don't actually get deleted. Instead, they're marked for deletion by the operating system and hidden so that they appear deleted. But they're still on the phone. Only when you sync your iPhone with iTunes are they truly deleted.
As far as I know, there are only a couple ways to truly and permanently delete SMS messages from your iPhone:
Sync - Since syncing with iTunes is what actually erases items you've marked for deletion. If you delete an SMS on your iPhone and then sync your iPhone, the message really will be gone for good.
Remove Messages from Spotlight Search - Your deleted SMS messages can't appear in a Spotlight search if Spotlight isn't looking for them in the first place. You can control what apps Spotlight searches in and which it ignores. To check this:
From your home screen, tap Settings
Tap General
Scroll about halfway down the screen and tap Spotlight Search
Scroll to the bottom of the screen and tap Messages to uncheck it.

HT201285 Why does Apple not give more info on spotlight search? Set up your system with all selections disabled and text two or three messages. Then go ahead and check messages and go to spotlight search and type any letter that begins a word. Messages ar

Why can't spotlight search be deleted or cleared? Why so secretive? The problem is that this is a huge business security risk.
Fix it Apple!!!

SteweyRoux wrote:
Why can't spotlight search be deleted or cleared? Why so secretive? The problem is that this is a huge business security risk.
Fix it Apple!!!
1) If you have sensitive business information on your phone, put a passcode on it.
2) Apple doesn't participate here. If you want to give them feedback, here's the link:
http://www.apple.com/feedback
Best of luck.

Does Mail search use Spotlight?

In Apple Mail, the search functions work poorly for me. I can find things by the category "From," for example, but searching for something in the "Entire message" doesn't find things that are there.
Does Mail use Spotlight for its searches? I have disabled it because it slowed down my old iMac too much.

Yes, Mulder is right, Mail Uses Spotlight for the Entire Message search (but not the To, From or Subject).
I am also running on a flat panel G5 iMac and found that with a clean Spotlight Database, Spotlight really speeds up and makes searching in Mail invaluable.
See my post below....
===
Leopard Mail Entire Message Search - FIXED!!!
My Original Post is here:
http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=7462907#7462907
Posted by: DaveC
This is a known issue. Check out:
http://www.betalogue.com/2008/02/25/mac-os-x-105-tip-repairing-broken-spotlight- searches-in-mail/
http://www.betalogue.com/2008/03/28/mac-os-x-105-broken-spotlight-indexing-for-m ail-messages-caused-by-presence-of-older-mail-application/
Thanks Dave. I went to Betalogue and went through all the posts and I finally found a way to fix the Search Entire Message Spotlight problem in Apple Mail - at least it worked for me. I have been trying to fix this with all sorts of solutions for months and it turns out it was related to a problem with the Launch Services Database. I confirmed this by looking inside my user/library/mail folder and seeing that inside each Mailbox folder, the sub mailboxes all had standard folder icons and not the inbox tray style icons.
Note that you can easily fix this through Terminal Commands, and not all the following steps are completely necessary, but there are many people looking at these threads that want to just push buttons...
*== So here are my simple steps to fixing Apple Mail Search ==*
1. Attach and turn on any external hard drives you have that may have a copy of Mail.app on them
2. Delete all OLD copies of Mail.app that you can find (don't worry about Time Machine), but make sure you keep the latest version of Mail.app in your working Applications folder.
~ This is so that the LaunchServices database won't easily become corrupt again
3. Install the latest version of Onyx - free to use and download from www.macupdate.com
~ I suggest Onyx, because some people don't want to mess with the Terminal.
4. Quit all open applications and run Onyx (it will want to check your Hard Drive etc...that's OK).
5. Go to the Maintenance pane and then the Rebuild tab and select only the LaunchServices box. Click Execute.
~ This should fix the primary problem with searches
6. When that process finishes, select only the Mail's Envelope Index box. Click Execute.
~ This should fix related problems with other searches
7. When that process finishes, select only the Spotlight Index box. Click Execute. (This process of Rebuilding your Spotlight Index could take hours depending on how big your hard drive is).
~ This will give you a clean fast Spotlight database that Mail uses for Entire Message searches.
8. Quit Onyx
9. Open Mail.app and test your Entire Message Search!
====
Hope that helps - it certainly, finally, did for me!
Bryce.

After updating to 4.3.5, spotlight does not search within text messages

HI,
I just updated my iPhone 4 to 4.3.5 and Spotlight does not search within the text of my SMS text messages any more. It only searches by the name of the SMS senders. There does not seem to be any setting I can adjust and I have restarted the phone several times but nothing changed.

I figured out how to get it working while retaining your data.
Connect your phone and perform a full backup.
Erase all data/media or restore the phone
Select setup as a new iPhone when prompted in iTunes. Give it some other name (i.e. "New").
Grab a copy of iBackupBot from here http://www.icopybot.com/itunes-backup-manager.htm
Run iBackupBot and select the new backup
In the file list, locate the file name SystemConfiguration/preferences.plist
Open the plist be double-clicking on it.
Copy the contents of this file to clipboard.
Select the full backup of your iphone under it's original name (make sure to grab the one with the latest date).
Locate SystemConfiguation/preferences.plist
Scroll to the bottom and note the Hostname for your phone.
Replace the contents of this file with the that from the "New" backup making sure to change the hostname and phone name in the last section of the plist.
Save the changes to the plist.
Connect your iPhone to iTunes
Right-click on it and select "Restore from backup"
Locate the latest backup under your phone's original name
When it's done restoring and reinstalling your applications, you should once again have push notifications that work over the cellular network.

Help with Spotlight search and "Copy to this computer"

I am trying to gather files from clients to my computer (admin). I use the Spotlight Search to find them. They show up in the list results, but for some reasons, I can't copy them to my computer. When I click on the file in the results list, I can't see the path and the file won't copy. I noticed that the files I can't copy are usually stored in users accounts on the client computer. Files that are stored ouside of the "Users" folder on the client computer, I can copy. It also depends on whether the account that "owns" the file is logged in or not. If it is logged in, I can see the path of the file and I can copy it to my computer. If the user is not logged in, I can't see the path and I can't copy.
I already posted several times about this.(post 3
post 2
post 1) and I can see that my last post is getting no reply and is slowly getting buried...
I am very discouraged because ARD was very expensive for our school to buy, and we bought it mostly for being able to easily gather files from students' computers to the admin computer. I never managed to make it work.
Our school is in West Africa and there is no support available here. Is there any other place where I can get support for this?
Thank you for your help.

I see what you are saying, I had never looked at it this way. Dragging to the desktop doesn't work either. However, like I said, it works fine when the user is logged in. You see, we bought ARD primarily to be able to gather students' files easily to the teacher's computer. My question then is, how do you gather files from client computers? I already tried with the File Search tool but I found that ARD would not find files that actually exist on the client computer.
Thank you for your reply,
A desperate ARD user.

When importing a cd on to itunes where is the original file kept because my itunes folder doesn't have it, the song does come up when i spotlight search it but i can't locate it

i cannot seem to find where the original file for tracks that have been imported from a cd are kept because they are not in the itunes folder, however the song is somewhere as it does show up on spotlight search and plays when i click it. where would i find it?!

It will be in the iTunes media folder location shown in iTunes prefs > Advanced.
Select the song, right click > Show file in Finder.

Does spotlight search your entire computer?

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