Spotlight

It occurred to me today during lunch that i very rarely use [Spotlight](http://www.apple.com/macosx/features/spotlight/) in OS X. When I say rarely I mean pretty much never. I think the last thing I used it for was to find a phone number that I knew I had written down somewhere but couldn’t remember where (turns out it was in an email). I guess this is the kind of thing spotlight is meant to be used for, but I wonder if I’m not getting the full benefit out of it.

I use [Launchbar](http://www.obdev.at/products/launchbar/) for all my app launching, web searching, file browsing, etc needs since spotlight just seems too slow to be an app launcher.

I have no need to use it to search for documents, as I tend to file things away in correctly named folders and sub-folders and I can find pretty much find any document I could need using launchbar.

I guess the only real thing I use it for is for searching inside files for particular things (i.e. the phone number which i now know was in an email). I guess this is where spotlight really ‘shines’ for me, because its really good at that.

But yeah, my use of spotlight is very limited. Its good to know it’s there if/when I need it.

Just found this [Spotlight Tips](http://www.apple.com/macosx/tips/spotlight.html) page from apple. Has some interesting things. I guess I could start using Spotlight more by actually adding in keywords for photos / files / documents.