Spotlight bug or normal behavior?

[yg17]

Just a minute ago, I wanted to listen to a certain MP3 by Disturbed but didn't remember the title exactly, but knew the title was "_____ burden" So I brought up Spotlight and typed in "Burden". Soundgarden's "Burden in my hands" came up, but that wasn't it. So upon going into my folder for Disturbed MP3s, I found the song, "Overburdened", the file named "(track #) Overburdened.mp3".

I wondered why Spotlight didn't find it, but then after a bit more testing, Spotlight doesn't pick up anything in the middle of a word, it only starts at the beginning. "Over" would have found the file, but not "burden". Searching for "afari" doesn't bring up Safari but "saf" does, "dium" doesn't bring up Adium, "adi" does, ect. Of course, you'll never search for "afari" or "dium" since you know the whole name, but in situations where you don't, the searching or partial words is helpful, and seems to me that this should be possible. Is this just a bug that needs reporting then? Or did Apple do this on purpose?

 

[gekko513]

I have noticed that, too, and it certainly is a limitation. I'm not sure if there is a way to search with a wildcard or similar, but if there isn't, I don't think Apple has done it on purpose.

It would be much more difficult to create, maintain and search an index that searches within words or takes wildcards into account, so it may not have been possible to have almost real time search and the indexing would take perhaps take too long or too much hard drive space.

 

[pknz]

I too have also noticed this just now I search for a program, xxx but it was not found because the program was actually xxx3000