There’s a lot of hooplah in the web world about Google Instant and it’s ability to turn up search results immediately while you type them. Is Google Instant really as new and revolutionary as it’s claimed to be? Yes and no. Yes for the web, and no for computing. You know what other prominent search engine has been providing instant and predictive search results based on user input? Apple’s very own Spotlight.
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If your Mac is suddenly running sluggish and you launched Activity Monitor, you may notice a process named ‘mds’ cranking away at 30% and even up to 90% CPU utilization. If you see this, don’t worry, it’s not abnormal behavior and your Mac isn’t crashing, it’s just indexing it’s built in search engine.

What is MDS in Mac OS?

mds stands for “metadata server” and the mds process is part of Spotlight, the amazingly powerful and very useful search feature built directly into the foundation of Mac OS X. You access Spotlight by hitting Command+Spacebar.

An easy way to identify that mds and Spotlight is indexing is to look at the Spotlight icon in the upper right corner of your menubar, when Spotlight is indexing the magnifying glass will have a dot in the center like so:

You can then click on the Spotlight icon and you’ll see your main hard drive being indexed, with a progress bar and estimated time until completion:

Is the mds process related to mdworker?

Yes. Usually you will see the mds process in conjunction with mdworker, which is another part of Spotlight and it’s indexing engine.

How long does mds & Spotlight take to finish indexing?

How long it takes to update the Spotlight index depends on a few variables, but mostly the size of your hard drive, the amount of data being indexed, major changes to the filesystem, and the time since last indexing. Just let the indexing complete, it generally takes between 15 and 45 minutes to complete.

If Spotlight isn’t working, you can check out these Spotlight troubleshooting tips which will get you situated again. If you don’t ever use the search feature or just don’t like it, you can also disable Spotlight and all of its indexing.

Do you know you’re looking for a JPEG but don’t want to search every other document type on your Mac? Speed up your search thanks to Spotlight search operators, just type:
kind:jpeg filename With this the only documents searched will be jpeg. You can specify just about any kind of document, from pdf, to doc, txt, etc.

There’s a whole post on search operators within Spotlight if you’re interested.

You can easily turn Spotlight into only an application launcher by adjusting the Spotlight search settings.

* Launch System Preferences
* Click the Spotlight icon
* Uncheck every item except for “Applications” and “System Preferences”
* Close System Preferences

Now your Spotlight menu will only return Application and System Preference results when a search is made, making for a very quick and completely integrated application launcher. Of course, you can use Spotlight as an application launcher even with the other search category items selected, but your search results will be a bit more cluttered.

You can easily adjust the search priorities in Spotlight so that Documents or anything else are listed first in the Spotlight search results. Here’s how to do this:

* Launch System Preferences
* Click the Spotlight icon
* You’ll see a list of search categories, you can drag these around at will
* The higher on the list the higher the search priority
* Set your desired search categories and priorities and close System Preferences

If you’re interested, learn how to greatly improve Spotlight searches with search operators, you will be amazed how precise you can get your Spotlight searches to be!

Spotlight is amazing at finding files buried deep within your Mac, but what if you found the file and don’t know what folder it’s contained within? Easy, just hold down the Command key when you click on the Spotlight search result you’re looking for and Spotlight will automatically open the containing folder with the file you searched for selected. Awesome!

You can quickly Get Info on any file or application from within Spotlight, simply highlight the file you want to Get Info on and hit Command+i to pull up the Get Info window. Very handy!

If you know a phrase that is contained within a document, but can’t remember the document file name, try searching for the phrase that you know appears within the document. Make this phrase search even more precise by putting the phrase itself within quotation marks, for example “all rights reserved” will find all files that contain that exact phrase only.

If you know the file type of a document you are looking for, you can pre-qualify search results by using operators within Spotlight. As you can see in the screenshot, I pre-qualified my search for ‘asia’ with the PDF filetype operator, which led Spotlight to only search PDF documents for the search term. You can even use date sensitive search operators, to search for files created or edited between, before, after, or on specific dates! This makes finding things even faster and more precise, so try them out yourself. Here’s a few example operators to enter before your search query:

Spotlight Search Operators

Note that all of these search operators are used in Spotlight in the following syntax format:
kind:audio Rolling

kind:application

kind:pdf

kind:jpeg

kind:word

kind:folder

kind:image

kind:audio

date:today

date:yesterday

Advanced Spotlight Search Operators

date:>10/1/09 will find any file modified after November 1, 2009, note that the dates you enter must correspond to the short date format you have set in your International preferences

date:<12/31/09 will find any file modified before December 31, 2009

date:1/1/06-12/31/09 will find files modified between the two specified dates. Example syntax is:
date:1/1/06-12/31/09 contract

You can easily open Finder windows containing any search results from the Spotlight menu. After you have entered a search query into Spotlight, highlight the item you want opened in the Finder and hit Command+R to reveal the item within the Finder. Alternatively, instead of just pressing the Enter key to access or open the file you searched for, hold down the Command key while pressing Enter and you will open the parent folder of the file or application.