Advice on Searching for Text in Numerous Files on my Mac

[Ambrosia7177]

Hi. I have thousands of news articles and videos that I need to use for research.

And because of the large numbr of files, I simply cannot remember everything I read/watch anymore.

So today, I am working on a TextEdit template that can be used to take notes about what I am reading/watching.

- Topic
- Summary
- Keywords
- Chapters
- Key Concepts
- Quotes
- Takeaways

The plan is to save a text file with the same name as the original article/video, but appending something like "_NOTES" on the end.

So for every article/video in my research fodler, I would have...

"Amazon Outage Forces Hundreds of Websites Offline for Hours.html"

"Amazon Outage Forces Hundreds of Websites Offline for Hours_NOTES.html"


Am trying to figure out the easiest way to search all of the "_NOTES" files on my MacBook Pro.

For example, maybe I want to find all articles/videos which are about "Pam Bondi" or "Tariffs" or "Ukraine", and thus would be searching my notes in these new "_NOTES" files.

Is there any practical way to do that say using Finder's search?

Not looking for "Full-Text" searching, but rather searching on Keywords or Topics.

The only alternative that I can think of is to create a spreadsheet, and then for everything that I want to search on (e.g. topic, keyword, important concept), create a new row in the spreadsheet with the file name and then the keyword like this...

1 | Amazon Outage Forces Hundreds of Websites Offline for Hours | Amazon
2 | Amazon Outage Forces Hundreds of Websites Offline for Hours | AWS
3 | Amazon Outage Forces Hundreds of Websites Offline for Hours | Cloud
4 | Amazon Outage Forces Hundreds of Websites Offline for Hours | Outage
5 | Amazon Outage Forces Hundreds of Websites Offline for Hours | Virginia

Of course that would be a lot of work for a simple search!

Someday I will build a database for all of this, but that isn't an option right now.

Am hoping there is some slick way to use macOS and Finder to help me accomplish my goals.

Thoughts?

 

[Mr_Brightside_@]

1. Cmd+F in Finder
2. Name > contains or is Amazon Outage Forces Hundreds of Websites Offline for Hours_NOTES.html
3. Click +
4. Contents > contains Tariffs or whatever

 

[Bigwaff]

Thoughts?

I've seen your recent posts... you need a document management system, my friend. The Finder aint' it. There are many to choose from. Some cloud based, some not. Here's one which runs on macOS -

DEVONtechnologies | DEVONthink

DEVONthink is an application for professional document and information management on Mac and iOS.

www.devontechnologies.com

 

[Ambrosia7177]

1. Cmd+F in Finder
2. Name > contains or is Amazon Outage Forces Hundreds of Websites Offline for Hours_NOTES.html
3. Click +
4. Contents > contains Tariffs or whatever

In Step 2, did you mean "Name > contains" or did you mean "Name > contains or is"?

If so, how would you get the latter?


What I hear you saying is that I can do complex searches just using Finder?

 

[Ambrosia7177]

I've seen your recent posts... you need a document management system, my friend. The Finder aint' it. There are many to choose from. Some cloud based, some not. Here's one which runs on macOS -

DEVONtechnologies | DEVONthink

DEVONthink is an application for professional document and information management on Mac and iOS.

www.devontechnologies.com

Can you explain why you say that?

And what would a "document management system" offer me?

 

[Mr_Brightside_@]

In Step 2, did you mean "Name > contains" or did you mean "Name > contains or is"?

If so, how would you get the latter?


What I hear you saying is that I can do complex searches just using Finder?

Like so

 

[Mr_Brightside_@]

Name > is can be a little restrictive, you have to type the filename exactly, no extra spaces or anything.

 

[Ambrosia7177]

Name > is can be a little restrictive, you have to type the filename exactly, no extra spaces or anything.

In a case like that, do you quote what you want an exact match on?

Name is "Exact article title here"

What is the difference between...

Name > matches

Name > contains

Name > is

 

[Ambrosia7177]

1. Cmd+F in Finder
2. Name > contains or is Amazon Outage Forces Hundreds of Websites Offline for Hours_NOTES.html
3. Click +
4. Contents > contains Tariffs or whatever

Is there any downside to putting my "_NOTES" into a word processing document (e.g. MS Word, LibreOffice Writer, etc.) instead of into TextEdit?


I use .TXT files all of the time, but in addition to adding notes, I would like to have a table where search attribute can be added, with the attribute in the left column, and a value in the right column, like...

Source:   NYT
Published on:  2025-10-20

Sure, I could just use tabs in TextEdit to get a similar experience, but a table would wrangle the data better.

Plus, if I have a .DOC or .ODT file, then I can take more nicely formatted notes for me to read later.

Thoughts on this?