Spotlight is this amazing wonder tool featured by Steve Jobs at one of the MacWorld Expo Keynote speaches within the last couple of years. Steve Jobs however walks around carrying a reality distortion field with him.

Spotlight is marginally useful and gets in your way when you are trying to use it. It insists on searching within files for the search key term when often searching for file names is adequate and preferred. There is no way to turn this off AFAIK.

The Finders find function also searches within files and gets in your way when you use it. More often than not I want to search just the file name. Often it will appear early in the search. Often I want to go to the enclosing directory rather than launch the documents' parent application. I have to wait until the function exhausts the search space. There should be a pause button. This would allow the user to stop the search and select from a result display.

I searched for 'they know where you live' and total search results was 1582. I selected 4 and opened them and searched for the key phrase and didn't find it. False positives - useless

20070627 I downloaded a pdf file the other day, saved it somewhere, now I wanted to read it. I went to the email and with the mouse placed the cursor over the link, and after a short wait the location info appeared, I switched to an irc client and typed the file name, selected and cut, then pasted into the spotlight text entry field. Spotlight reported not found. So, false positives and false negatives