Spotlight issues: search within files isn't working. (Help!)

[Leia1912]

Hi, all,

Spotlight under Lion is being an incredibly frustrating part of the OS right now. (Seriously, this whole upgrade has not made me happy.)

I want to search within files. In particular, I want to search for items with tags I embedded into them, in the Twitter style. (I'm an historian, so I'd write #revolution1917, for example, by a source for the Russian Revolution.)

I go to the Finder to search, because Spotlight in the upper right is apparently too stupid to handle searches within files.

I enter a kind of document (plain text) to narrow down my search.

I even select the folder where the documents are located, to help Spotlight out.

I hit the plus, set up "Contents" contain, and type, "#revolution1917" (minus quotes).

....and I get nothing.

I take off the hashmark, just to see if that's causing some kind of problem.

Nothing.

I'm so frustrated with this (and all the other little Lion problems) that I am close to crying.

Can anyone please offer any advice or consolation to deal with this?

Thanks for listening!

(2010 i7 MPB, by the way.)

 

[SandboxGeneral]

It doesn't appear that Spotlight can search within files. But I found this app online that will. I've not tried it myself, but it may be of help to you.

EasyFind

 

[Partron22]

Has your copy of spotlight been given sufficient time to rebuild it's index of the HD yet?
Mine has, and it finds bits of text within files just fine.

 

[Leia1912]

Thank you both for responding! And thanks for the tip about the app--I might just check that out. I know Spotlight *can* search within files--I just did a contents search in Snow Leopard on my mother's older MacBook and SL found the files I wanted in a couple of seconds, despite them being newer (downloaded from Dropbox.)

Overall, I'm not sure what's happening here. My MBP *should* have had enough time to finish indexing--I had it on several hours on Lion day and the next day. (Interrupted by a visit to the Apple Store for a suspected hardware issue.)

Here's an idea: Maybe something went wonky with my indexing, because my computer had 4 crashes requiring entire computer reboot in the aftermath of installing Lion?

(Apple just replaced my logic board as the suspected cause of the crashes.)

 

[negatlov]

my spotlight is all right.