Is it possible to do a sophisticated search in Mac

Question

It trying to search for a document that has the word "CIA" in it but it appears that Mac never heard of whole word search or quotes.

Answer 1

I don't know why the other poster answered in the negative.
The Mac certainly knows how to do the kind of search you're asking for. Without quotes around CIA in the search field, Spotlight finds a file name or a file with contents with any word that begins with CIA (ciao, ciabatta... hmm, not lots of English words starting with cia...). In a Search window, you can specify that cia could be any part of the word: Garcia, uncial (as opposed to the Spotlight menu, where it always is the beginning of a word.
Using quotes around a phrase - "time machine" looks for that exact phrase. Without the quotes, the two words must be in the filename or contents but not necessarily together, or even in that order: "the machine takes time to warm up" would satisfy the non-quote search.
Using quotes around a single word: "CIA" keeps the search from including that as part of the word, so you'll get CIA only - sounds like exactly what you were asking about.
If you're not getting these correct results, there's something else going on, but you should be aware that the Mac does work that way for searches, so you have to look at other issues - such as is the place where the target document resides been excluded from the Spotlight index.
s.