Searching a Particular Location
You can tell Meta to perform your search only in a particular location on your computer by using the search: tag. If you have some idea as to where the document you're looking for might be, this is a great way to get fewer results from your search.
For example, if you're looking for a document that you know you put on your Desktop, and you know it has the phrase "super turkey" in it, but now you can't find it because you tend to keep way too many files on your Desktop, you could use a search like this:
search:~/Desktop "super turkey"This query would tell Meta to search only within your Desktop folder for documents containing the phrase "super turkey".
Learning More: Using Multiple search: Tags
You can include more than one search: tag in your query. Meta will look in each location that you specify for results. If you want to search for files with the phrase "hungry hippos" in both your Music and Pictures folders, you could use this search:
search:~/Music search:~/Pictures "hungry hippos"Learning More: Valid Search Paths
Note that you need to put the path to the folder in which you want Meta to search after the search: tag. The path always either starts from the root directory on your computer ("/"), or from your home directory, ("~/"). So, to search in your system-wide Applications directory, you'd use a search tag like this: search:/Applications. On the other hand, if you wanted to search within your personal preferences folder, you would use a search tag like this: search:~/Library/Preferences.
Learning More: Built-In Search Locations
There are three special built-in locations you can use with the search: tag:
search:home- Searches the user's home directory. Identical tosearch:~/search:computer- Searches all local mounted volumes, including the user's home directory (even if it is a remote volume)search:network- Searches all user-mounted remote volumes
The names of the built-in locations are case insensitive, so search:Home, search:HoMe, and search:home all specify the user's home directory.
Learning More: Spaces In Search Paths
Note also that there shouldn't be a space between the search: tag and the beginning of the folder's path. However, you can put quotes around the folder's path, and you must do so if the path contains a space in it, like so: search:"~/Documents/Online Receipts".