Spotlight (Apple)

This article is about the search feature in macOS, iOS, iPadOS and visionOS. For the named entity extraction tool, see DBpedia Spotlight. For the lock screen feature in Windows, see Windows spotlight.

Spotlight
Operating systemMac OS X Tiger and later, iPhone OS 3 and later (Spotlight Search), iPadOS, visionOS
TypeDesktop search
Websitesupport.apple.com/en-us/HT204014

Spotlight is a system-wide desktop search feature of Apple's macOS, iOS, iPadOS, and visionOS operating systems. Spotlight is a selection-based search system, which creates an index of all items and files on the system. It is designed to allow the user to quickly locate a wide variety of items on the computer, including documents, pictures, music, applications, and System Settings. In addition, specific words in documents and in web pages in a web browser's history or bookmarks can be searched. It also allows the user to narrow down searches with creation dates, modification dates, sizes, types and other attributes. Spotlight also offers quick access to definitions from the built-in New Oxford American Dictionary and to calculator functionality. There are also command-line tools to perform functions such as Spotlight searches.

Spotlight was first announced at the June 2004 Worldwide Developers Conference,[1] and then released with Mac OS X Tiger in April 2005.[2]

A similar feature for iPhone OS 3 with the same name was announced on March 17, 2009.

  1. ^ Ina Fried (June 28, 2004). "For Apple's Tiger, the keyword is search". Retrieved November 15, 2009.
  2. ^ Apple, Inc. (April 12, 2005). "Apple to Ship Mac OS X "Tiger" on April 29". Retrieved November 15, 2009. Spotlight searches the contents inside documents and information about those documents, or metadata