Apple Search Engine Options in 2025: What Works, What’s Broken, and What to Try Instead
Apr 8, 2025
If you’ve ever sat at your Mac thinking I know I saved that somewhere, only to be met with a blank Spotlight window or a wall of irrelevant files, you’re not alone. The truth is, file search on macOS hasn’t kept pace with how we work today.
In 2025, your Mac isn’t just a tool. It’s your second brain. It's where you store meeting recordings, design assets, voice notes, PDFs, screenshots, slides, and inspiration you never got around to organizing. That means your search engine has to do more than match filenames. It has to understand you.
So what are the real Apple search engine options today? What works? What’s broken? And what should you actually be using?
Let’s break it down.
Option 1: Spotlight (The Default, but Not the Best)
Spotlight is Apple’s built-in search tool. It’s fast for launching apps and pulling up recent documents. It looks polished. It’s deeply integrated into macOS.
But the moment your query requires any depth, nuance, or context, Spotlight falls flat. It depends on exact keyword matches and doesn’t really understand what's inside your files. Ask it to find a sentence buried on page 38 of a PDF, or a scene in a video? Good luck.
And with the latest macOS Sequoia updates, Spotlight’s reliability has dropped even further. Missing apps, broken indexing, and strange bugs after sleep mode have made many users question if it’s still usable at all. We covered this in detail in Why Spotlight Is Failing on macOS Sequoia.
Spotlight is great at finding apps. It’s not great at finding meaning.
Option 2: Find Any File (Powerful, but Outdated)
If you’re a power user, you’ve probably tried Find Any File. It’s a longtime utility that offers system-level file search with more depth than Spotlight. It can peer into system folders, run low-level queries, and dig through metadata.
But FAF hasn’t changed much in the last decade. Its interface is dated. Its workflow demands you remember file names, folders, and file types. If you can recall exactly what you saved and where, it’s solid. If you remember an idea, a phrase, or a moment in a video, it won’t help you.
In our full comparison, Find Any File vs Fenn, we break down why both tools serve different purposes—and why one is built for 2025, while the other still feels stuck in 2012.
Find Any File is a great tool if you know exactly what you're looking for. But if you don't, you're out of luck.
Option 3: Raycast (Fantastic Launcher, Not a File Search Tool)
Raycast is one of the most loved Spotlight alternatives out there, especially for developers and productivity nerds. It’s lightning fast, keyboard-first, and supports an incredible number of extensions.
But when it comes to searching your files? It mostly punts. You’ll need to install third-party plugins just to get basic file search, and even then, it doesn’t offer deep indexing or semantic understanding. It’s not built to find ideas, visual moments, or buried content. It’s built to run commands.
We explore this more in Raycast vs Fenn, which highlights how these tools solve fundamentally different problems.
Raycast is a launcher. It’s not a search engine.
Option 4: Fenn (Built for the Way You Work in 2025)
Fenn is a new kind of search engine for macOS. Built from the ground up for modern workflows, it’s designed to help you find exactly what you’re looking for—even when you don’t remember the filename.
It searches inside your files. Videos, PDFs, screenshots, images, slides, voice notes. Not just filenames, but actual content. Visual. Audio. Textual. Semantic.
So if you type “dog with a birthday hat” or “that Zoom call where we discussed Q3 pricing,” Fenn understands what you mean and shows you the exact result. Even if that file is called final_idea_v2.mov.
It all runs locally on your Mac. No cloud. No delay. No privacy risk.
We explain how it works in The Vision Behind Fenn, where we talk about how Apple Silicon makes private, on-device AI-powered search finally possible.
Fenn is what Spotlight should have become. And it’s available right now.
So, What Should You Use?
Here’s the honest answer: it depends on what you’re trying to do.
Tool | Best For | Weaknesses |
|---|---|---|
Spotlight | Launching apps, quick lookups | Shaky indexing, no deep file understanding |
Find Any File | Power users, system-level access | No semantic or multimedia search |
Raycast | App launching, productivity workflows | Limited file search support |
Fenn | Searching inside videos, images, docs, voice | Requires Apple Silicon (M1 or later) |
If you mostly launch apps and need a clean interface, Raycast is excellent. If you're debugging or hunting for buried system files, Find Any File is still relevant. But if you're working with messy folders, creative assets, or content-rich documents, and you don't want to lose hours digging through your Mac, Fenn is the only option that’s actually built for how we use our computers today.
The Bottom Line: Search That Understands You
Spotlight had its moment. But in 2025, it’s not enough.
You don’t need a search engine that just matches text. You need one that understands ideas. One that works offline. One that respects your privacy. One that finds that random screenshot from last month with the Wi-Fi password, or the exact part of a meeting where pricing came up, or the image of a bear on a unicycle you saved for no good reason.
That’s the promise of Fenn.
If you’re tired of pretending that search is solved, it might be time to upgrade.
Try Fenn now and never lose a file again.