Spotlight behaviour

[whooleytoo]

After reading the threads about upcoming Spotlight features, I decided to figure out why Spotlight works so poorly for me and not for others, and I've finally nailed it. (Maybe you all knew this, but it's news to me):

Case is very important for Spotlight.

If you have a file called "happydays", you'll only find it if you search for the letters it starts with. I.e. "h", or "ha", or "hap" etc.

However, if you call the file "happyDays", you can also find it by searching for "D", or "Da", or "Day".

This is a major PITA for me, as I originally thought Spotlight would find any the text anywhere in the name. (Note to self: I wonder what happens if I name all my files UPPERCASE? ), and makes Spotlight fairly unusable (for me!), since I don't know the 'case' of my file names, I can't trust the results Spotlight gives back.

 

[whooleytoo]

As it turns out, it's better (though obviously impractical) to name your files in all uppercase as they would be more readily searchable.

i.e.

a file called "themonkey.txt" can only be search for by the start of it's name ("t", "th", "the" etc..).

but

a file called "THEMONKEY.TXT" can be search for by any substring ("th", "mo", "y" etc.)

This only applies to filenames. In a file's contents, you will only find text at the beginning of a word (more's the pity).