… or, more precisely, it was when I switched OUT of Google to another search application that caused the problems.

I’d searched for a particular lyric (one I’ve used before) “When Venus the goddess of beauty and love.” In Google, this works perfectly–I can find the music easily.

But then, once I’d switched back to my laptop I used Apple’s Spotlight search utility to find a copy of the song lyrics that I knew I had on my hard drive somewhere.

I tried and tried.. and failed. Trust me, I’m 100% sure I’ve got a copy–the question is Why can’t I find them?

I thought that perhaps the index for the Spotlight system was broken, but no–after a few moments I figured out that it was user error. I’d been entering the same query complete with the quote marks:

[ “when Venus the goddess of beauty and love” ]

And THAT wasn’t working.

Luckily, I figured out quickly that Spotlight searches for whatever you enter, including the quote marks. So, to make it work, I had to NOT use the double quotes!

Fine.

It means that I have to know the particular details of each search / find engine I use! It’s not an onerous burden, but you need to know, if you’re going to use these tools well.

This impressed me so much that I made a short video about it… Here you go…

Hope you find this one useful!

Search on!