One trick is to know that spotlight indexes content and metadata separately, and most search interfaces default to content. Typing in "README.md" in system spotlight will look for documents that contain a reference to that name, while "name:README.MD" will look for ones marked as _having_ that name.
The search interface in finder has a builder for predicates (start a search then hit the plus on the right side of the search bar). There you can start to see some of the friendly prefixes for filesystem items such as extension:, kind:, date:, tag:.
You can also see the mass of file specific metadata - like width, audio bit rate, city, genre.
I have not, however, found a handy way to translate between English description, friendly prefix, and the internal query names like kMDItemContentType.
Fun aside - some of these used to work in the Mac app store - for instance, you could search for listed applications which could open exotic document types.
The "uselessness" IMHO is mostly in that it exposes the most simplistic interface possible, and people just don't know where to go from there (other than terminal users going `man mdfind` I suppose). That gap is only widened by how different it is from other filesystem-based mechanisms for power users, which have more established commonalities like regex and filesystem globbing.
The search interface in finder has a builder for predicates (start a search then hit the plus on the right side of the search bar). There you can start to see some of the friendly prefixes for filesystem items such as extension:, kind:, date:, tag:.
You can also see the mass of file specific metadata - like width, audio bit rate, city, genre.
I have not, however, found a handy way to translate between English description, friendly prefix, and the internal query names like kMDItemContentType.
Fun aside - some of these used to work in the Mac app store - for instance, you could search for listed applications which could open exotic document types.
The "uselessness" IMHO is mostly in that it exposes the most simplistic interface possible, and people just don't know where to go from there (other than terminal users going `man mdfind` I suppose). That gap is only widened by how different it is from other filesystem-based mechanisms for power users, which have more established commonalities like regex and filesystem globbing.