Spotlight is a system-wide desktop search feature of Apple's macOS, iOS, iPadOS, and visionOS operating systems.

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 Settings.

Spotlight also offers quick access to definitions from the built-in New Oxford American Dictionary and to calculator functionality.

Spotlight was first announced at the June 2004 Worldwide Developers Conference,[1] and then released with Mac OS X Tiger in April 2005.

It is fed information about the files on a computer's hard disks by the mdimport daemon; it does not index removable read-only media such as CDs or DVDs,[3] but it will index removable, writable external media connected via USB, FireWire, or Thunderbolt, and Secure Digital cards.

Apple publishes APIs that allow developers to write Spotlight Importer plug-ins for their own file formats.

[3] The first time that a user logs onto the operating system, Spotlight builds indexes of metadata about the files on the computer's hard disks.

Clicking on an icon in the top-right of the menu bar opens up a text field where a search query can be entered.

Finder windows also have a text field in the top-right corner where a query can be entered, as do the standard load and save dialogue boxes.

The search results can be further refined by adding criteria in a Finder window such as "Created Today" or "Size Greater than 1 KB".

The unique Spotlight window in Tiger allowed sorting and viewing of search results by any metadata handled by the Finder; whereas Spotlight Finder windows in Leopard are fixed to view and sort items by last opened date, filename and kind only.

Instead of it acting as a drop-down menu, it is now located in the center of the screen by default, though the search bar (and/or the window itself) can be dragged to wherever the user prefers it to pop up.

On September 17, 2014, Spotlight Search was updated with iOS 8 to include more intuitive web results via Bing and Wikipedia, as well as quicker access to other content.

[15] Additionally, Apple has stated that while Spotlight seeks to obscure exact locations, the information is typically more precise in densely populated areas and less so in sparse ones.