I will take a look at the Quartz Composer. Thanks for the suggestion.

If you’ve ever fired up the Quartz Composer in the Development Tools you’ll know that it has a really nice way of linking objects so that even very complex systems can be kept track of quite easily. As spotlight progresses and we’re able to tap into so much more data the complexity of searches may increase and an interface like that in Quartz Composer might be the way ahead.

Obviously for very simple searches it might be overkill, but for complex searches that you do on a regular basis (Smart folders) it could have some potential.

In order to achieve what I need, I end up using raw queries instead, which maybe underlines the difficulty of providing a user interface for Spotlight’s features that indeed achieves the right balance between simplicity and power.

When it comes to user interface issues, the single-most important feature, in my opinion, is the ability to type one’s search keywords in full before Spotlight starts searching for them. In that respect, I find that Butler is the most useful utility. I have just assigned the control-F shortcut to the general Spotlight search command, and it’s then easy to switch between Content and File Names in the little dialog that pops up, and then type the keywords, and then press Return to start the search.

I’ve been using a nice little app called “MoRU” instead. It‘s nothing special, but it works. It doesn’t suffer from any of the puzzling awfulness of Apple’s interface and handily leverages the “under the hood” power of Spotlight perfectly well.