macOS Tahoe finally puts the Spotlight where it belongs

20 years later, Spotlight returns to the spotlight on the Mac.

- BY JASON SNELL

Twenty years ago, Mac OS X Tiger introduced us to a search feature that would stand the test of time: Spotlight. And while at the time I found myself ambivalent about its many quirks, some of which were maddening (fave. co/4IOWaXy), with the benefit of hindsight, it's hard not to be impressed by how far Spotlight has come.

Almost every year, Apple has made Spotlight a little better, and macOS Tahoe is its biggest and most impressive upgrade ever. So let's celebrate Spotlight for what it was, is, and is about to become.

WHEN DISKS BECAME BIG ENOUGH TO SEARCH

As soon as the classic Mac OS became capable of holding more than a few dozen files on tiny floppy disks, there was a need to find files. So Apple introduced a tiny app called Find File that would let you search for a file by its name. Later, in the System 7 era, when capacious (for the time) hard drives were standard issue, you could search by multiple criteria, including file attributes, such as type and date.

Apple's first big leap came during the Mac OS 8 era, when it revamped search and called the resulting app Sherlock. Of course, Sherlock (the app, not the detective) has now become a verb for Apple building software that replaces popular third-party utilities. (The aspect of Sherlock that "sherlocked" the competition was actually its support to search various web databases from within an app.)

Leaving that whole can of worms aside, Sherlock also introduced a more sophisticated way of searching: based on the content inside a document. We think of this as standard, but back in the day, searches really only were of the filesystem. With Sherlock, Apple also introduced the idea of indexing your drive, building a database containing information about your files and what they contained. It was the very end of the Classic Mac OS era, so it gets short shrift, but Sherlock really was the proto Spotlight.