How To Customize Mac OS X Spotlight

In this Episode: How To Customize Spotlight Search Results.

Spotlight makes locating your files effortless, but what if you are not happy in the way it spills out it’s results or you don’t like the order the results are delivered or better still you don’t want certain disk or Folders from being indexed…like a secret Folder for example.

TRANSCRIPT:

This Episode will show you how to customize Spotlight the way you want.

So….Let’s get Started

There are Three ways to open the Spotlight Preferences center in order to customize Spotlight.

Firstly, by clicking on the System Preferences Icon on the Dock or from the Applications Folder in Finder and click on the Spotlight Icon.

Secondly, after Performing a search, choose Spotlight Preferences… at the bottom of the spotlight menu.

And Thirdly, from Spotlight itself, by pressing cmd + spacebar and begin typing spotl, then highlight Spotlight and press Return.

Now, with the Spotlight Preferences Center open, you can begin the customization by:

Choosing Spotlight search order, simply click and drag the categories with the hand cursor to the position you want.

You can also un-check which categories you want omitted from the Spotlight search result menu.

Also, you can change the Default Keyboard shortcuts shown with one of your own to activate the Spotlight menu or open the search window in Finder.

Finally, this is probably my favourite Spotlight feature, you can choose to Prevent Spotlight from searching and indexing certain Disk or Folder which you don’t want to appear in the Spotlight Search menu.

For example, if you have a Secret Folder that you want to be kept private, simply drag or press the plus (+) button to add to the Privacy List or press the minus  (-) button to remove items from the Privacy list as shown here.

Incidentally simply adding and removing a disk or folder rebuilds the Spotlight search Index, useful if you find that Spotlight is not giving you the results you are looking for.

Please note: After adding and removing a Disk, building the Spotlight Search Index could take a while, depending on the size of your disk.

And that’s all there is to it.

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