94 MACWORLD JUNE 2019
WORKINGMAC SPOTLIGHT TIPS AND TRICKSSpotlight searches) is a quick
way of erasing Spotlight’s
index of a particular corner of
your Mac. When you remove
the disk folder from the
Privacy tab, Spotlight cranks
up its background processes
and re-indexes everything.
You’d be surprised how often
this is the way to solve a
frustrating series of failed
searches.
I’ve also found Spotlight a
helpful companion for files I store on cloud
services. Since Dropbox works by syncing
my files to my Mac, Spotlight will index
them and make them searchable just as it
would any other file. But because I also
use Google Drive for some documents, I’ve
installed Google Backup and Sync, an app
that “syncs” my Google Drive with my Mac.
I used sarcastic quotes in that previous
sentence because Google doesn’t really
download the contents of Google Docs
and Google Sheets onto my Mac. Instead,
it downloads empty files that have the
names of my cloud documents, and when I
click on them, the real documents open in
my web browser. Because the real text of
the documents doesn’t reside on my drive,
I can’t search within them—but I can still
search on their filenames. I use search all
the time to open up Google Docs and
Google Sheets files directly.
BEYOND SPOTLIGHT
Spotlight is a powerful database of files, but
Apple’s attention to the Spotlight interface is,
er, spotty. If you really want to take control of
your file searching on macOS, it’s worth
considering the $34 utility HoudahSpot (go.
macworld.com/houd), recently updated to
version 5.0. HoudahSpot offers a flexible,
friendly front-end to searching the Spotlight
database. If I’m being honest, HoudahSpot is
the Spotlight interface that would be built
into macOS if Apple had continually
improved Spotlight over the last decade and
a half... but it hasn’t.
This week John Voorhees at
MacStories had a good overview of
HoudahSpot 5 (go.macworld.com/hod5),
which is worth a read. If you find yourself
getting frustrated by the limitations of
Apple’s Spotlight interface, HoudahSpot
will make you feel a lot calmer. ■HoudahSpot 5 adds a powerful and flexible interface on top
of the Spotlight database.