By Graham K. Rogers

There have been changes to a number of the panels in System Preferences following the update to OS X 10.8, Mountain Lion. Spotlight Preferences appears to have remained unchanged although there are minor differences. Both of the panes appear to be identical to how they appeared in OS X 10.7, Lion, but a close look reveals some changes.

Spotlight is a system-wide search facility introduced with OS X 10.4. It uses HFS (hierarchical file system) to find information on a disk and integrates with the Finder. In theory, any data recorded on the disk, including text, file names and file metadata, are indexed by Spotlight.

Search Results

In earlier versions of OS X there were 14 categories. An addition with 10.7 was "Spreadsheets" while "Mail Messages" was changed to "Messages & Chats" then. With the update to version 10.8 of OS X, other differences include a change from "Events & To Dos" to "Events & Reminders" and the addition of "Developer". The panel is slightly taller because of this.

Each item has a check box so can be deselected. A category may be dragged up or down to change the order of results. In my user account, "Documents" is the top category, followed by "Presentations", with "Developer" last.

Updating Spotlight occurs immediately a file is saved. If I search for that last sentence, my text file is the top hit: it is a Document and, chronologically, the most recent.

Privacy

This panel has another use in updating the Spotlight database. If a folder or disk is dragged to the panel, then dragged out again, Spotlight will then re-index that location. This includes the computer's hard disk, so is a way to re-index the disk.

Notes

By pressing the button at the side, there are a number of other key commands available as options. If one is selected that is already allocated to another feature, a yellow warning triangle will appear to the right. With the options menu open, it is possible to type in another key combination.

Graham K. Rogers teaches at the Faculty of Engineering, Mahidol University in Thailand. He wrote in the Bangkok Post, Database supplement on IT subjects. For the last seven years of Database he wrote a column on Apple and Macs.