I do understand that the point of Spotlight is to look inside files, but it also returns file name matches, and that's what I need most of the time. Besides, Spotlight is running so absurdly slow on my system (Snow Leopard on the iMac '08), it's just unusable. I downloaded Canary and Spotlight wasn't able to find the app file for 15 minutes. It was already in the download stack, but as far as Spotlight goes, the file doesn't exist.
Hence, I would like to know of a way to make Spotlight only index the file names, which would perhaps make it a bit faster. I'm looking at mimicking the behaviour of Windows applications such as AvaFind or Search Everything
Edit: Let me highlight the fact that I am looking for an AvaFind or Search Everything replacement for Mac OS X. Go try one of these on a Windows machine and you'll understand my disappointment with Spotlight or any other popular search tools in OS X.
Best Answer
As far as I know, Spotlight is hardcoded to work this way. Most people in your situation simply disable spotlight, and use an alternative, like EasyFind.
If this is too drastic, you may want to clear out Spotlight's
.Spotlight-V100file at the root of your drive to force reindexing. Once reindexed, you might see better performance (and you might not).