How Spotlight works, Core and global Spotlight, importing failure, exclusions from indexing, re-indexing, excessive re-indexing, failure to find, iCloud Drive and network shares.
search
Try searching for something you know is in a file in ~/Library/Preference and you’re unlikely to get any success. This explains how, and why you can’t alter that.
Why Spotlight can now take a long time building and updating its volume indexes. Understand when forcing them to be rebuilt is a good idea, and when it isn’t.
How to prefix a file or folder name with a . to hide it, how to use chflags, and how they differ. And what are all those .DS_Store and ._ files doing?
How you can use regexes to make search more powerful and reduce the number of irrelevant entries it returns.
Searching the text content of PDF documents often doesn’t work well, sometimes not at all. And recovering what you can see is text can also fail miserably.
Does macOS use Live Text to extract and index recognisable text in images? Is that a good or bad thing if it did? What about PDFs?
Text can be searched by eavesdroppers and crawlers to discover its content and extract it for other purposes. How to make their task more difficult using Unicode.
Version 1.3 adds drag and drop onto a document window, and a Scratchpad to store keywords that you use often. For 10.14.6 and later.
Second beta adds support for all metadata keys, has an extensive Help book, and saves results in a text file. Discover the keywords you can search for.
The Eclectic Light Company 