Ever since going Mac in 2011, I found word-searches of either the whole system, or external (WD 'My Passport for Mac') hard drives, present a list of totally-unrelated files, despite viewing 'By Name'. The required files are often not even anywhere in the long list given, and had to be searched-for, manually, by 'Date Created'. This is a really weak feature of Macs, which they never sorted out. Don't recall the same frustration with Windows. Any ideas?
Got a tip for us?
Let us know
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.
Mac Word-Search Function Useless-Weird!
- Thread starter trevor2522
- Start date
- Sort by reaction score
Well, it seems to work fine for me. I just searched for a word in a directory with over 20,000 files, and got 21 results which were all related - they either contained the word in the file name or in the file content. Perhaps these files you think are unrelated contain the key word in the file content itself. For example, if you search for the word "sunset", you may get a PDF showing up that's entitled "invoice-9375" that you think isn't related, but then you open the invoice and notice the company's address is on "Sunset Blvd", etc.
But if you click the "+" button to add a search criteria, you can specify "name" + "matches" + [keyword] to return only search results containing the key word in the file name.
But if you click the "+" button to add a search criteria, you can specify "name" + "matches" + [keyword] to return only search results containing the key word in the file name.
Last edited:
