How to search with Spotlight more effectively

Question

I'm used to using various flags to modify the results of Google searches, to only show results from a particular site, or only certain kinds of files.

For example you can restrict Spotlight searches to only look for pdf files like this example, when I'm looking for a pdf cheatsheet for using YUI's grid system css framework on my computer.

YUI grid kind:pdf

I'd be amazed if Apple's Spotlight didn't have loads of other handy flags to fine tune a search in the same way - what tricks do you use, or where do you look to find more tips to improve your Spotlight-fu?

Answer 1

There's a whole article regarding this subject here. In short:

• you use boolean operators, such as AND, OR, NOT
• applying quotation marks will search for exactly the phrase you want
• using name: keyword will only search file names
• author: keyword allows you to search files by file author (Spotlight will find only files produced by programs that save this attribute—Mail, iChat, Word, Excel, Pages, Numbers, and a few others)
• you can use date:today, created: date and modified: date to search for files by a particular date
• you can refine your search to only find certain file types using kind: filetype (the article I linked to contains all the possible file types you might need)