Changing search options...

your have to click the name of the folder in quotation marks next to this mac on the search bar that pops down. i dont think that you can make this behaviour default. although you can do this with pathfinder which is a finder equivalent if you wanna look into that.

 

i think panther used to do this before spotlight came in tiger. but i guess thats wats spotlights all about searching your whole "computer" in an instant.

leopard tried to make this behaviour better by not showing system files in spotlight by default to make the search results a bit easier. this made spotlight even more counter productive for me as i mostly use spotlight to search system files because i cbf looking for them. now i have to add a "system files - include" criteria in finder search which is pretty annoying.

 

I agree.. I find this very annoying as well. There should be an options menu where you could define where you would like to search first..