Spotlight (software)

Spotlight is a system-wide desktop search feature of Apple's OS X and iOS operating systems - wikipedia

Spotlight is a selection-based search system, which creates an index of all items and files on the system. It is designed to allow the user to quickly locate a wide variety of items on the computer, including documents, pictures, music, applications, and System Preferences.

In addition, specific words in documents and in web pages in a web browser's history or bookmarks can be searched.

Spotlight in OS X Yosemite showing Wikipedia article on Bugatti Veyron. Icons of Safari were replaced with Firefox icon. (it is possible to change the default web browser in OS X, so it's accurate.) - wikimedia - wikimedia

It also allows the user to narrow down searches with creation dates, modification dates, sizes, types and other attributes.

Spotlight also offers quick access to definitions from the built-in New Oxford American Dictionary and to calculator functionality. There are also command-line tools to perform functions such as Spotlight searches.

Spotlight was first announced at the June 2004 Apple Worldwide Developers Conference, and then released with Mac OS X v10.4 in April 2005.

A similar feature for iOS 3.0 with the same name was announced on March 17, 2009.