Advanced search functionality

As powerful as Spotlight is, it actually offers a somewhat limited set of search options. True, searching in Mac OS X -- be it with Spotlight or its predecessor, Sherlock -- has always offered an array of search criteria (text, date, type of file, size). But until now, the ways that you string those criteria together has been limited. Spotlight in Leopard is designed to offer advanced search functionality by allowing you to select a variety of boolean operatives. (Apple has said so far that AND, OR and NOT will be supported.) Being able to string them together yields a more stringent search result.

In Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger, if you wanted to search for a file whose name contained the word "car" -- and you knew it was either a text or PDF file but didn't contain the phrase "hybrid" -- you could search for all files with car in the name and scan through the results (many of which might be images or movies or other types of files). Or you could search for text files with car in their names and then search for PDF files if you didn't find what you were looking for initially. While both methods would work, you'd either have excess files to check or you'd need multiple searches.

In Leopard, you'll be able to enter a search that specifies car in the file name, text or PDF as the type, and not files containing the word "hybrid."

Using Spotlight as an application launcher