Simplify Spotlight Searches in Mac OS X 10.4

Regular readers of this blog will have discovered that I'm a late adopter. In the case of 10.4 (Tiger), I actually upgraded within the first few months of its release only to downgrade a week later due to problems I won't go into here.

After another six months or so, the benefits of upgrading clearly outweighed the downside, so I jumped in and have been a mostly happy user ever since. One of the things I was never happy with was the "improved" searching in Spotlight. I guess there must be some people who want to find every single type of file on their system that has something to do with their search criteria, but basically I only ever want to search for file names. Call me old school, but I could care less about keywords or color labels, and if I can't find a file, chances are I can't remember the last time I modified it. So I was thrilled when I found this Macworld article which outlines a Finder hack for simplifying Spotlight searching. Scroll down to the tip on "Revert to the previous Find window". It doesn't actually modify Spotlight, it just simplifies the default settings for basic filename searches. (Remember why it's called "Finder"?)