OSX Spotlight – Filter “Safari history item” and mailboxes
November 4, 2008
Most folks browse the web and some do so often. This creates a history which Safari conveniently stores for future reference. The feature is especially useful when you go to “History -> Show All History”.
What isn’t so useful is searching for a file and receiving thousands of results for “Safari history item”. This shouldn’t be an issue because there is an option to remove “Safari” from Search Results, however, this option fails to remove Safari history items from Spotlight search results.
To disable Spotlight from searching “Safari history item”:
- Open System Preferences, go to Spotlight and click on Privacy pane
- open a new Finder window
- browse to <home> /Library/Caches/Metadata/Safari
- Drag and drop “History” folder from Finder to Privacy pane
- Filtering Specific Mailboxes: browse to Library/Mail/
- Find offending .imapbox, .mbox, or any other; drag and drop onto Privacy pane
As far as I can tell you can filter many of the Spotlight searches by adding any of the folders in Library/Caches/Metadata. Here is what my Privacy settings look like:
Spotlight Privacy Filter
Hopefully you made it here and didn’t see this:
January 3, 2009 at 6:03 pm
THANK YOU
worked great.. found you with google
“safari history item spotlight”
January 28, 2010 at 1:46 am
Thanks! This will at least make 10.5′s spotlight a little less useless.
Compared to 10.4′s spotlight, 10.5′s a real pain. It’s so inefficient. At least this tip helps a bit!
July 26, 2011 at 3:09 pm
I’ve been searching everywhere for how to do this! Thanks SO much for this tip!