This page deals with the perennial problem of finding things on your computer, and in particular on a Mac running OS X. There is no Google desktop search for the Mac, but if you have OS X 10.4 (Tiger), then there is Spotlight. However, what about people who either don't have Tiger or (a common phenomenon) don't like Spotlight? The answer is: searching has always been one of the strong points of UNIX, so there is a lot of search functionality already there, hidden in the depths of the Darwin system.
Mac search tools do well at small and medium-sized Web sites. While most heavyweight search-engine tools aren't available for the Macintosh, users say the handful of Mac-based search engines can. Search for a file by location. In the left-hand sidebar in your Finder, you'll see a list of locations on your computer where files are saved. Click on any of these icons to search by that location. Click 'All My Files' to see all of the files on your computer in the same view. Start a Finder search There are several ways to access Spotlight via the Finder. You can open a generic Finder window and use the search box at the top, press command-F to convert any open Finder. Using OS X's Finder, you can do some fancy-schmancy advanced searching, including finding system files for troubleshooting. No more rooting through folders when the results you want aren't.
Spotlight
Starting point
It seems the main problem with Spotlight is that making everything searchable doesn't imply that everything will be findable. The list of retrieved files in a Spotlight search is often too exhaustive to be directly usable. It is important, therefore, to know how to restrict such searches. This is discussed on Apple's Spotlight tips page. I'll collect some of my own bits of information below.
Spotlight insight
Several years into the life of Spotlight, the iteration found in Mac OS X Snow Leopard is meanwhile quite mature and can be customized from within the Finder, as the screen shot shows.
The Spotlight tips page mentioned above provides more insight into Spotlight's inner workings. It's all about collecting metadata in a central store. But as will be discussed below, this is nothing completely new to UNIX (see the locate command, but also the various help systems such as apropos). So it's no wonder that Spotlight's functionality turns out to be accessible from the Darwin command line as well. This is an advantage that far outweighs its drawbacks, because it shows Apple is really trying to take the needs of the UNIX-level user seriously.
Spotlight allows you to customize your searches to a certain extent from within the Spotlight search box . For example, ending a search phrase with kind: pdf will throw out all non-pdf items. To go further, the Terminal is more useful. The main Spotlight terminal command is mdfind. The Terminal lets you get the most out of Spotlight because it makes 'post-processing' easier. Although the advanced options of the GUI search box also let me do things like kind: lyx (because I have installed a Spotlight importer for LyX), this doesn't work for arbitrary file types. On the command line, I could get all the LyX files containing the word Bratwurst by typingmdfind Bratwurst | grep '.lyx'
Similarly, I could find all the non-PDF files containing this search term mdfind Bratwurst | grep -v '.pdf'
Here is something you can do with Spotlight that you can't do so easily with the old Finder (Sherlock): Let's say you remember you once wrote a C program that had to be linked with the accelerate framework. You don't recall the name of the program, but would like to find it so you can see how you did the linking. But you're at home at your little Panther laptop away from the big number-crunching Mac at work where the programs are (OK, I don't have a Panther laptop anymore — it's just an example). So log into that machine by ssh. If all your programs are in the directory 'prgs', you can now type mdfind -onlyin progs accelerate, and your problem is solved in the blink of an eye. The man page for mdfind gives more information. Some features are not in the man page. To discover them, just type mdfind without arguments.
In order to achieve the same thing with regular UNIX command tools, one has to think harder and wait longer. Nevertheless, I'll go into some possible non-Spotlight approaches in what follows. In principle, one could use the command-line Spotlight tools to relieve small machines of the Spotlight activity alltogether by backing such machines up onto a large computer where Spotlight then indexes everything. The small computers could pretty much disable Spotlight for those directories that are backed up. Then if a difficult search needs to be performed, it could be done remotely on the backup server.
Spotlight importers
There are some files that aren't searched by Spotlight, but that should be. One of these is Mathematica Notebooks. There are importers available for many file types now; check the pageat Apple's Spotlight Mac OSX web site.
EasyFind
If you want an alternative to Spotlight, have a look at EasyFind. Its methodology does not rely on indexing, as does Spotlight's.
UNIX find and grep
This is the command-line way. Combined with some scripting, these commands can be very powerful. They also don't rely on indexing, so they actually do what you expect a search to do: look at the data that's really on your disk. You may have encountered the pitfalls of indexing with internet search engines like Google: sometimes the page summary you get in the search results doesn't correspond to the actual contents of the page because the index is not in sync with the web page that is in fact online. For more information on find and grep, invoke the info command from the command line or in emacs and examine the section Basics.
Locate: Spotlight 'light'?
Command line
UNIX (and Darwin) has a command called locate which, like Spotlight, makes use of an index database to find files. However, this database is not updated continuously. Instead, one usually sets this up to be updated periodically. The initial setup of the database is done by sudo launchctl load -w /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.locate.plist (to administrate updates, see updatedb). So this is a compromise solution between the Spotlight way and the EasyFind Way. It is mostly useful for people who do not have Spotlight, i.e. those not running Tiger, or those who disabled Spotlight completely because they don't want a process interfering whenever something is saved on disk.
To compare locate and mdfind, try to find a file with both approaches (here I choose a PDF file that exists on any computer with a TeX installation):
mdfind 'kMDItemDisplayName pdftex-a.pdf'locate pdftex-a.pdf
mdfind wins by a factor of five. Both search methods also permit wildcard characters. However, mdfind can do more complex searches as mentioned above. If you're interested in trying this approach, it is advisable to not use Apple's version of the shell command, because its indexing function does not handle the prunepaths option correctly (which allows to exclude folders from indexing). Instead, use the version provided by fink. You do this with fink install findutils. The findutils web page provides some online documentation. This package also installs a different version of find. With the fink installation, the automatic database update job is also set up for you (using crontab - an entry is created in /sw/etc/cron.daily/findutils), without any additional work on your part. The update job just runs quietly in the background at the predefined intervals, and all you will then notice is a few minutes of increased disk activity (depending on the size of your file system). The difference to Spotlight is that locate by itself does not search inside files; on the other hand, it leaves the file system alone for most of the day. Of course this way the database typically does not contain changes made in the last few hours, but for a reasonably organized user the need for searching should arise mostly with files older than that.
Any Search malware is a browser hijack that, once your Mac is infected, displays the Any Search homepage whenever you launch Safari, Chrome, or Firefox. It looks like an innocuous search page, and in fact forwards all searches to Yahoo, but it also intercepts traffic and uses that to display adverts. It manages to bypass Apple’s built-in security measures by being bundled with what look like legitimate downloads, such as Adobe Flash Player.
What is Any Search Manager virus?
Any Search Manager is a browser extension, which appears after updating Flash Player and changes your default start page in the browser. It behaves like a browser hijacker, which means it takes control over your browser and prevents you from visiting pages you want.
The first warning sign that you may have caught Any Search virus is when you’re being redirected to search.anysearch.net or other pages containing “search.anysearch” in their URLs.
Search Engines For Mac Fast Import Software
Why does the browser redirect you to Any Search Manager?
If you have downloaded some free apps lately, Any Search may be distributed with any of them. Any Search malware spreads along with the Safe Finder extension. The latter one is also malicious.
When you give permission to the seemingly legitimate download to be installed, the bundled hijacker gets permission too. That’s why you should always be certain of what you’re downloading and double-check the website you’ve downloaded it from before you give permission for anything to be installed. Fortunately, it’s not too difficult to remove.
How to remove Any Search from your Mac
Check your Mac for unauthorized profiles
- Go to the Apple menu and click on System Preferences
- Look for a pane called Profiles. If it’s there, it will be next to Accessibility
- If it’s there, click on it and look to see if there is a profile called AdminPrefs
- If it’s there, unlock System Preferences by clicking the padlock and entering your login details, if necessary
- Click on the AdminPrefs profile and click the ‘-‘ button at the bottom left of the window
Check your Startup items
Malware like the Any Search Manager virus sometimes inserts itself in your startup items so it launches every time you boot your Mac.
- Go to System Preferences again and click the Users & Groups pane.
- Unlock it using the padlock, then click on your user name in the left-hand pane.
- Choose the Login items tab in the main window.
- Look for anything that seems suspicious.
- If you find anything, click on it then click the ‘-‘ button at the bottom of the window to remove it.
Alternatively, there is an easier way to remove login items, using CleanMyMac X, which scans your Mac for startup processes and allows you to remove them with one click. CleanMyMac also allows you to quickly and easily remove browser extensions, uninstall apps, and reclaim tens of gigabytes of disk space.
Get CleanMyMac here. It's a free version that allows you to remove a few login items completely for free.
Remove Launch Agents and Daemons
- In the Finder, click on the Go menu and choose Go to Folder.
- Type
/Library/LaunchDaemons - Scan the list of
.plistfiles and look for anything with a name you don’t recognize. - If you find one, click on it and preview the file, looking for the name of a vendor you recognize.
- If you don’t find one, drag the file to the Trash.
- Repeat steps 1-5 for
/Library/LaunchAgentsand~/Library/LaunchAgents - Once you’ve dragged all the files you want to remove to the Trash, empty it and restart your Mac.
How to remove Any Search from browsers
How to remove Any Search from Safari
Reset the default page in browser
- Once your Mac has restarted, launch Safari
- Click on the Safari menu and then choose Preferences
- Click on the Search tab and choose the search engine you want to use
- Select the General tab and set the Homepage to your preferred home page and the options above it to your preference from the menu options
How to remove Any Search from Chrome
- Launch Chrome.
- Click the Settings menu icon (three horizontal lines) on the left of the window or type
chrome://settings/into the address bar. - Click On start-up and check the button next to “Open a specific page or set of pages”.
- Click on the More icon (three vertical dots).
- Choose Edit and type or paste the URL you want as your start-up page into the text box.
- Click Save.
- Click on the Settings icon again.
- Choose Search Engine.
- Click Manage search engines and press the More button next to the Any Search engine, then select Remove from list.
- Click on the dropdown menu next to the “Search engine used in the address bar” and choose the search engine you want to use. Alternatively, click Manage search engines and either add one from the bigger list (by clicking on the More icon and choosing Make Default) or press Add and type in the URL of another search engine.
How to remove Any Search from Firefox
- Launch Firefox.
- Press the settings button (three horizontal lines) on the right-hand side of the toolbar, or type
about:preferencesinto the address bar. - Click the Home category and next to “Homepage and new windows” click on the dropdown menu and choose either Firefox Home or Custom URL. If you choose the Custom URL type the URL you want to open into the text box.
- Click the Search category and in the main window, scroll down to “One-Click Search Engines”. Click on Any Search and press Remove.
- Scroll back up and click on the menu under the Default Search engine and choose the one you want.
Remove suspicious browser extensions
The final steps for removal [Important]
So far we've cleaned the browser part — what's left is it to root out AnySearch from your system parts associated with Chrome and other browsers. First, we will need to check if AnySearch has seized your Chrome settings.
STEP 1
Please open Chrome, paste this string into the URL field, and press Return: chrome://policy/
You will see something like this:
See the Level and Policy value columns. What's written there?
'Recommended' means AnySearch has gained control over your Chrome settings — need to uninstall Chrome.
'Mandatory' means the malware is sitting deeper and is tied to your user account
— go to step 2 below.
For additional check:
Go to Applications/Terminal
Open Terminal, paste the following command, and press Return: defaults read com.google.Chrome
Now, look through the results. If you see anything related to Anysearch there, you can simply uninstall Chrome and reinstall it anew. The best way to uninstall Chrome along with all leftovers is CleanMyMac X's Uninstaller tool.
STEP 2
If that is not the case, please open Finder, go up to the Go menu in the menubar -> Go to Folder, and paste this directory: /Library/Managed Preferences/[your username]
You should enter [your username] as shown in System Preferences/Users & Groups
Open the folder. Now look for a “com.google.Chrome” file there.
Google For Mac
If you have found it in any of these locations, please open the file in any editor and check if you can find any Anysearch-related information there. Then, manually remove the info from the file and restart your computer.
The same logic applies to Firefox and Safari browsers.
Protect your Mac
Once you’ve removed Any Search manager, it’s a good idea to check for more malware. CleanMyMac X's Malware Removal tool scans your Mac for adware, viruses, spyware, and cryptocurrency miners and lists anything it finds in its main window. It then offers you the opportunity to remove them with one click or review its findings and choose what to remove. It’s a good idea to run the scan regularly to keep your Mac protected.
Internet Search Engines For Mac
Download the app's free version here.
To avoid getting malware like Any Search, be vigilant when installing apps on your Mac. Don’t skip installation options and choose custom installation to deselect optional software download, if you aren’t sure the software that comes bundled is safe.
Any Search Manager is a nasty piece of malware that can be quite alarming when you first encounter it. However, it’s not too difficult to remove, so long as you’re diligent and follow the steps above. If you couldn't delete it and the virus shows up again, please contact us at support@macpaw.com for further instructions.
Hope this article was useful. Stay tuned for more.
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