Desktop for Mac Help

Because Google Desktop stores a lot of information, search queries can often use some refinement. To quickly find the results you need, you can narrow your search by using the following advanced operators:

- If you enclose your query in quotation marks, Desktop only returns items containing the exact quoted phrase, for example:
"digital camera"

will ensure your search returns the exact phrase.

- The "filetype:" operator finds files with a particular file extension. For example, to find PDF documents, search for filetype:pdf 

- If you use the "filename:" operator, Google Desktop will search only the names of files, not the content within them.

- The "minus sign (-)" placed immediately before a word excludes it from your search. For example, to find results that mention dogs but not cats, search for: dogs -cats

- If you include the "site:" operator in your query, Desktop only returns results from the website you specify. For example, to find webpages that mention the word “Spotlight” on Apple’s site, use the following query:
Spotlight site:apple.com

- When searching for email, you can narrow the results by using the following operators: "Subject:," "To:," "From:," "CC:," and "Bcc:."

- You can narrow your search to certain date ranges:
   - The "datefrom:" operator specifies the earliest date that you want in the range.
   - The "dateto:" operator specifies the latest date in the range.
   - The "date:" operator lets you specify results from a particular day.

For example, you can type the following,

baseball datefrom:4/01/2002 dateto:10/21/2002

to find results between the two dates that contain the word "baseball." (Google Desktop uses the short date format as defined in your “System Preferences” > "International" pane.) You can also use the terms today, yesterday, lastmonth, and lastyear. For example, the following search term,

grapefruit date:yesterday

finds the word "grapefruit" in documents created yesterday.