Introduction

Search Kit is Apple’s content indexing and searching solution. It offers a powerful and streamlined procedural C framework, based on Core Foundation conventions, that you can use add information retrieval to your app, or command-line tool.

In OS X, Search Kit provides fast information retrieval in System Preferences, Address Book, Help Viewer, and Xcode. Apple’s Spotlight technology is built on top of Search Kit to provide content searching in Finder, Mail, and the Spotlight menu.

Search Kit’s features include:

Search Kit is not for locating the position of search terms within a document or for finding documents based on their file-system attributes. For information on these other types of search, see How Search Kit Works With Documents.

Who Should Read This Document

This guide provides the background you’ll need to use Search Kit to add fast content searching to your application. If your application focuses on metadata rather than document content, you may want to consider using Spotlight instead.

Organization of This Document

Search Kit Programming Guide contains the following chapters:

A glossary at the end lists terms that you need in order to understand information retrieval in general and Search Kit in particular.

See Also

You may find this additional information from Apple helpful: