Search using partial file name?

Question

I know this issue has been addressed before, but I haven't found a satisfactory answer.
I use the Search field in the toolbar to search for files on my external drive. That external drive contains a file named "housefly.psd." When I search for "house" using the File Name filter and with columns set to Kind, all the Photoshop files that begin with "house" appear at the top of the window, including the file I'm searching for.
But if I search for "fly," the "housefly.psd" file doesn't appear in the list at all, although files containing the word "fly" with a space before the word show up in the list (e.g. - "big fly.psd").
Users aren't always going to remember the initial characters in a file name they want to find. So how do I find the file if I only remember some of the internal characters?
Thanks,
Andy
iMac, OS 10.6.8

Answer 1

Andy Tubbesing wrote:
if I search for "fly," the "housefly.psd" file doesn't appear in the list at all, although files containing the word "fly" with a space before the word show up in the list (e.g. - "big fly.psd").
Yeah, isn't Spotlight great?! Give this example to all the experts who gush about Spotlight.
What you see is how Spotlight was designed to work -- at least for hoi polloi like us. The query looks for words, not strings. "Fly" is one word, "big fly" is two words, but "housefly" is one word. It contains the string "fly", but not the word "fly". Now, if you had had the foresight and forethought to name your file "HouseFly", then probably Spotlight would have found it, "Fly", unlike "fly" being, by the rules of the Apple wallahs, a word, not a string. Is that all? No, of course not, that would have been too simple. Spotlight also has hidden somewhere a private list of exceptions. So "books" in "Audiobooks" is always a word, no matter how capitalised; but in "Cookbooks" it's just a mere string, and hence not worthy of notice.
How do you get around this (without using Terminal)?
(1) One way is to construct a query, as already suggested, with the Filename and Contains. But, beware! if you're searching in Finder, and you've already entered a string in the Spotlight search field on the toolbar, the query constructed thus will be restricted to the hits of the query already in the search field. So, if you've enter "fly" in the window toolbar search field, and then construct a Filename Contains "fly" query, you'll find nothing, because any subset of the ∅ (empty set) is also empty. This restriction applies to any query thus constructed.
(2) If you are a real, hair-chested, red-blooded Mac user, you don't use namby-pamby Filename queries. You go straight for the jugular. In the pop-up menu, instead of "Filename", choose "Other...". Then scroll through the interminable list to "Raw Query" and enable it. Then type in the Raw Query search box
kMDItemFSName == *fly*
Note 1: "*fly*", not "*fly", because the Item's File System Name is "housefly.psd".
Note 2: You can use the keyword "name" in the window toolbar Spotlight search field, thus
name:housefly
However, this one doesn't take wildcards.
(3) If you happen to be just a normal person, who uses a computer to be productive and not to exercise one's fingers by typing lengthy and abstruse keywords (or as a Rorschach test to have fun divining the inscrutable minds of Apple engineers), then my suggestion is to give Spotlight the widest possible berth and use something else. I suggest Find File by John R Chang, Find Any File by Thomas Tempelmann, and EasyFind by Christian Grünenberg.