Am I misunderstanding something here?
Quoting the Apple doc to which I linked in post #10963...
Spotlight provides fast desktop searching by extracting metadata in the background and storing the indexed metadata for future searches. When a query is made, the indexed metadata is searched for matching files. (Emphasis added)
Your question to tacit, though, presumes that the
indexed metadata is what we call the
Spotlight index...
Do you mean that every Spotlight search undertaken when indexing is enabled consists of both a lookup against previously-indexed metadata and a real-time search of filenames? And that when indexing is disabled, Spotlight only performs the latter? Or is it that Spotlight still performs both searches but returns no results from the former since there's no index? (Emphasis added)
As I read, and imply from, the Apple doc, Spotlight uses the
indexed metadata for a file search and the
Spotlight index for a content search, which would explain why my disabled, theoretically index-less Spotlight behaves as described.
And this quote from MM T3's linked doc supports that...
The technologies that power Spotlight are:
A database consisting of a high-performance meta-data store and content index that is fully integrated into the file system. (Emphasis added)
[....]
That suggests that Spotlight searches its "all-inclusive" database as respects any search term (within the search parameters, of course).
And addressing tacit's post that elicited yours...
When you search by file name, Spotlight just does a search of the computer's directory--it doesn't even look at the index. So blocking the formation of an index won't disable a search by name.
The parameterless search I described was for a word I knew was in both a particular file's name
and contents, and it seems that Spotlight found my
word-as-file-name in the metadata portion of its database but could not find my
word-as-content because of the lack of a content portion of the database.