Spotlight behavior in Leopard

Question

Can someone explain this to me:
If you create a folder in Leopard on the desktop and call it "12345678" and then search for 2345678 in Spotlight, why doesn't the folder appear in the search results? This worked in Tiger. It worked in Win95 for that matter.
Now for the kicker: Search for 12345 and your folder will appear, as if by magic. This one simple exercise tells me that I can't trust Spotlight searches at ALL right now.
I've read that Leopard ignores file names that it doesn't think are important in search results. It uses some kind of "logic" to return "smart" results and keep you from being overwhelmed by the search results. Believe me, I'm not overwhelmed by Zero Results. I'm decidedly underwhelmed.
I can do this same experiment with my macbook and 10.4 and the folder shows up no matter which parts of the file I am searching for.
Yes, I know you can hit the "plus" button in the search window and go in and force it to search "filename" and "contains" instead of the default(!) "begins" but that is probably a 15 second process every time, because the "save" option for the searches doesn't work with file open/save dialog boxes when you use spotlight within them. Big Fat Bummer.
I have about 10000 SKUs in our product catalog that I need to pull images for all the time. They are named by UPC and most of them have the same first 4-5 digits because they are part of the same product classification. That means that in Tiger I can search for the last 4-5 digits of the UPC and get a result. In Leopard, that same approach returns zero files. I am very sad. Am I missing something? I've looked all over for a preference that I can change to force Spotlight to always show me ALL results, no matter how irrelevant it thinks they may be. Is there a script that will troll through an entire folder and put a copy of the file name into the "comments" field so that Spotlight will pay attention? Is this really, truly not considered a bug? It's so difficult to work around this problem that I've resorted to using an FTP client (Transmit) and connecting to my OWN machine as if it were an FTP server, because Transmit will search based on file names (and only based on file names, as it happens). It will get me results faster than using Spotlight. On my local drives. Is this thing on? Anybody home? Hello?

Answer 1

First off, I'm not suggesting that the Spotlight interface (especially the GUI portions) isn't frustrating to use and buggy. Nor am I suggesting that using the command line is the right way to do it or necessarily easier (I know that for most people it is not).
However, since I do spend a lot of time with a command line shell open, I feel I should at least mention the "mdfind" utility. In my experience, this utility is extremely accurate returning results. It doesn't feel like there's any sort of governor on it, like with the GUI interfaces, which can be both good and bad I suppose. With a properly formed search string, mdfind can be very powerful. And, since it's a command line utility, you can combine it with some other Unix tools like "grep" or "xargs" to do some really cools stuff.
In your example, with a folder named "12345678", I can run this query from the command line:
% mdfind "kMDItemFSName = *45678"
and find that folder. I could also do this
% mdfind "kMDItemFSName = \*45678 || kMDItemFSName = 87655\*"
to find that folder or a folder named 87654321. There's also time based searching, less than/greater than comparisons, inequality comparisons, etc. Granted, it takes a little bit to familiarize yourself with the metadata attribute names, but there's only a handful that are typically useful so it's not that much of an issue (IMO). Run "mdls" on a file to see the attribute names.
Since mdfind is searching the central metadata store, it's also pretty quick. Even though some of the other apps mentioned are multi-threaded, they still have to traverse the file trees looking for matches...
Hope this helps.
Message was edited by: glsmith