Spotlight is a system-wide desktop search feature of Apple's Mac OS X operating system. Spotlight is a selection-based search system, which creates a virtual 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. As well, specific words in documents and in web pages in a web browser's history or bookmarks can be searched. 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 built-in New Oxford American Dictionary and to calculator functionality.
The feature is also available on Darwin, but only through a command-line interface. A similar feature for iOS 3.0 with the same name was announced on March 17, 2009.
Spotlight was first announced at the June 2004 Apple Worldwide Developers Conference, and then released with Mac OS X v10.4 in April, 2005.
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