No longer limited to just your files and apps, OS X’s search tool, Spotlight, reaches out to even more online sources of data to let you access more information more quickly. Want to see the scores from last night’s game? There’s no need to open Safari and search the Web. Just press Command-Spacebar and type in the team’s name. Spotlight gives you scores, stats, and schedules before you can say “Google.”
In addition to sports, El Capitan adds weather and stocks to Spotlight’s quick-access information and lets you search YouTube and Vimeo in a flash. But perhaps most powerfully, now you can search the way you speak. Instead of setting criteria, just type in what you want to find. For example: email from Dave with image or photos from June①.
① El Capitan’s Spotlight easily does searches that once required several steps in the Finder or advanced know-how.
Start a Search in Spotlight
To activate Spotlight press Command-Space or click the magnifying glass icon in the menu bar. The Spotlight search field appears in the middle of your screen.
Type your search term to begin.
Preview Your Results
As you type, Spotlight guesses what you seek. You might have to type only a few characters before hits appear in the left-hand list below the search field, divided by category. Select one with your arrow keys or pointer.
When you select a search result, its preview appears in the pane to the right. Here you can look at a PDF, or play a song or video, without ever launching an app ②.
② Many types of media appear right in Spotlight’s preview pane. In this example, click a song name to hear the music play.
New! Search Using Natural Language
Spotlight promises to save you time and effort by letting you search using natural language. What does that mean? You can take things up a notch to do fairly complex searches without pondering how to set them up. Just type a query the way you’d speak it.
Say you want to find a presentation you created on Monday. In Yosemite, you could do this in Spotlight, but only if you knew a few tricks and the exact date—typing, for instance, presentation created:09/14/15. Otherwise, you’d end up plugging criteria into a Finder search (File > Find) using pop-up menus. As of El Capitan, the search is as simple as typing presentation from Monday in Spotlight ③.
③ Need to find the presentation you made Monday? No problem.
But say you wanted to find a particular email message in the Mail app from your friend Suki that you recall had an attachment. Before El Capitan, this search was beyond Spotlight’s powers. You would have to launch Mail, type From:Suki in the search field, choose her name in the drop-down menu, type attachment, and choose Message Has Attachments from a drop-down menu.
You would find what you were looking for, but it would take a bunch of steps. Now just type a phrase in Spotlight—email from Suki with attachment—and you’re done ④.
④ El Capitan makes possible searches that once would have stumped Spotlight.
When Natural Language Doesn’t Come Naturally
Despite this feature’s power to simplify complicated searches, you’ll probably find yourself surprised by aspects of using it that seem downright unnatural.
Type what’s the weather and then add a question mark to your…um, question about the weather, and you won’t get Spotlight results. Type What's Apple's stock price today? (with or without the question mark) or photos from spring (instead of a particular month like March or April), and you’ll get the Spotlight equivalent of a blank stare.
All that’s to say: Spotlight is no Siri. (Yet.) Keep it simple and be prepared to experiment with phrasing. And, if you’d really like to talk into the Spotlight search field, try your Mac’s Dictation feature, described inMove Easily between Devices with Handoff.
What Can You Find?
El Capitan’s Spotlight lets you find many types of information on your Mac and on the Web. Here are some of the highlights:
Applications: Spotlight has always been able to act like a simple application launcher. For instance, start typing keychain and the app appears as the top hit ⑤. Press Return to launch it. This saves you from digging around in your Applications folder—especially if the app is nested in a folder, as is Keychain Access, Disk Utility, and many other tools.
⑤ Don’t bother digging through your Applications folder for an app. Use Spotlight to find and launch it with a few key strokes.
Bookmarks and history: Bookmarked sites and Web pages that you’ve looked at recently will also appear in your Spotlight results.
Contacts: Spotlight finds contact information quickly and easily. Hover over a piece of information in the preview pane to reveal icons that you can click to call a number, send an email message, look up an address in Maps, and more ⑥.
⑥ Use Spotlight to look up contact information quickly.
Currency and unit conversions: For those times when you need to substitute kilometers for miles or liters for quarts, there’s no need to head to Google or your dog-eared copy of Joy of Cooking. Just type in the Spotlight search field—say, 3 1/2 cups or 3,000 miles—and Spotlight shows common conversions.
Files of all types: Spotlight lets you search for files on your startup drive and any attached drives. The preview pane helps you make sure you have the right one.
Once you’ve found what you want, launch it in its default app by pressing Return. (You can tell what the default app is by the icon that appears at the top right of the Spotlight window.)
iTunes and iBooks Store results: Results include music, movie, and TV shows matching your term in the iTunes Store as well as your iTunes library. As of El Capitan, you can now buy or rent movies from iTunes in the preview pane ⑦. Matches in the iBooks store appear, too. Press Return to open a store to that entry.
⑦ Click a button in Spotlight’s preview pane to rent or buy a movie from iTunes.
Local businesses: Looking for an Italian restaurant? Sushi? Type in your search term and results from Maps appear for nearby restaurants. Select one to see its location along with Yelp reviews—all without leaving Spotlight. The same thing goes for bookstores, pet stores, coffee shops, you name it ⑧.
⑧ When you’re looking for a cup of coffee, Spotlight finds local matches from Maps.
Movie showtimes: Search for Movie Showtimes to see nearby flicks and times under the Now Playing in Theaters header. Type in a movie’s name and look for hits under the Movies or Now Playing in Theaters header to see showtimes and its Rotten Tomatoes rating, as well as links to trailers.
New! Sports: El Capitan brings quick sports information to Spotlight, including stats, schedules, and scores. You’ll have the greatest success with men’s professional football, baseball, basketball, hockey, and soccer. Look for Stephen Curry and the Golden State Warrior’s stats appear ⑨.
⑨ Check a player’s stats in Spotlight, as long as that player is on a professional men’s football, basketball, baseball, or hockey team.
Or, type Manchester United for scores from the team’s latest game ⑩.
⑩ Use Spotlight to keep up with the home team’s latest scores and game schedule.
As this book goes into production, men’s football is the only college sport Spotlight Sports covers so far. You might need to experiment to get a team’s name right. For instance, Crimson Tide doesn’t work, but Alabama Crimson Tide does.
As for women’s sports, the WNBA is represented—search for Seattle Storm and you’ll see scores. But that’s as far as it goes (for now). Spotlight doesn’t include any player stats and leaves out women’s pro soccer as well as all women’s college sports.
Lovers of tennis, golf, and other noble sports will be vexed to find their favorites overlooked, too. Search for Serena Williams or Tiger Woods and you’ll find no Sports header for them. Search for US Open or PGA Championship and likewise, zilch.
New! Stocks: Spotlight now adds stock information to Spotlight’s repertoire. Type in the ticker symbol (for example, AAPL for Apple) to see the latest stock prices ⑪.
⑪ See today’s stock prices by typing in your favorite company’s ticker symbol.
New! Transit: If you are in one of the few cities that Apple has added public transit information for, you can see bus and train schedules. For instance, if you’re in the San Francisco Bay Area, type in a station name (Oakland Coliseum) to see when the next train is coming.
Quick definitions: Not sure you’ve got the right word? Spare yourself the trouble of opening the Dictionary app (or embarrassing yourself). Type a term—for example, crampon or kerfuffle—into Spotlight and look for the Definition header. Click this and all will become clear ⑫.
⑫ Wondering about a word? You can use Spotlight to look up what it means.
New! Weather: Type my weather to see forecasts based on your location. To see weather conditions elsewhere, type in a statement like weather in Yosemite⑬.
⑬ Type my weather to see forecasts based on your location. Type weather in followed by a city name for results from far-flung locales.
New! Web video: You can search for video on YouTube and Vimeo directly from Spotlight. Type a query like El Capitan youtube and look for the Web Video header in results list ⑭.
⑭ El Capitan’s Spotlight makes it easy to find videos on YouTube and Vimeo, but you may have to scroll down in your hits list.
Wikipedia entries: For better or for worse, Wikipedia is often the first stop for many of us when we’re looking for an answer to a simple question. Spotlight shows summaries of Wikipedia pages in the preview pane. Press Return to open the full page in Safari.
Omit Types of Results
It’s great that Spotlight can return so many different results, but what if it’s all too much?
Go to System Preferences > Spotlight > Search Results and take a look at the categories. If you know you’ll never want to see a certain type of results—for instance, it’s likely you don’t often need to search for fonts—uncheck the checkbox next to that category.
Exclude Files from Spotlight
You might not have a problem with Spotlight finding documents in general, but have a very big problem with it finding particular documents on your drive. Whether it’s super-secret documents, naughty love letters, or the redundant contents of a backup drive, you can exclude these files from Spotlight altogether.
Go to System Preferences > Spotlight > Privacy. Drag a folder or disk onto the window, or click the plus button and navigate to the item.
Consider Spotlight Suggestions and Privacy
Speaking of privacy, how does Spotlight get you all that nifty information about local weather, movie showtimes, and nearby restaurants anyway? It pings your location, sends the information back to Apple, and then generates results to match.
In fact, Spotlight sends a fair bit of information back when your searches leave your computer to venture out to the Internet or one of Apple’s stores, including your search terms and which result you pick.
If that doesn’t bother you, carry on. If you need a little more information to decide whether it bothers you, go to System Preferences > Spotlight > Search Results and click the About Spotlight Suggestions & Privacy button.
If you’ve got the heebie-jeebies just thinking about this, deselect the Allow Spotlight Suggestions in Spotlight and Look Up box ⑮.
⑮ Turn off Spotlight Suggestions altogether, by unchecking this box (circled).
icon in the menu bar. The Spotlight search field appears in the middle of your screen.
button and navigate to the item.