Shine a light on searches with Spotlight

Save yourself the hassle of rummaging around the web – or your Mac – for vital info and documents

1 Spotlight categories

Search results in Spotlight are a mix of content from the web, and whatever macOS High Sierra finds on your Mac’s drive (and in iCloud Drive). If you don’t find certain categories useful, you can disable them in the Spotlight pane of System Preferences.

2 News sources

It’s not going to replace a newspaper, but Spotlight now includes a news section for articles related to your search term. You get a synopsis for each article, and a link to the original online. It works pretty well for getting the latest on sports teams.

3 Location maps

You can of course fire up Maps (or visit Google Maps in Safari) to find out where a place is. But type a location into Spotlight and it’ll bring up a small map that’ll give you the basics of where that place can be found – along with photos and further information.

4 Siri Knowledge

Under the rather vague heading of Siri Knowledge, you’ll find what amounts to an expanded flash card about a given subject or term. Mostly, imagery, info and stats are pulled from Wikipedia, but you also sometimes get links to other sites and the odd map. And it may dig up something surprisingly useful.