Spotlight is great if you are using OS X. It helps to find anything quickly. But sometimes it returns too many results to be useful. There is a way around this though.

You can tell spotlight to limit results to certain types of files using the "kind:" search modifier which is followed by a file type and then the actual search term. For example, if you are looking for an email message concerning widgets, instead of just searching for "widgets", you can search like so: "kind:email widgets" and this will limit your results to email.

For reference, here are the available options for the kind modifier and the types of files that they refer to... some types of files work with more than one modifier:

Applications -- kind:application, kind:applications, kind:app
Contacts -- kind:contact, kind:contacts
Folders -- kind:folder, kind:folders
Email -- kind:email, kind:emails, kind:mail message, kind:mail messages
iCal Events -- kind:event, kind:events
iCal To Dos -- kind:todo, kind:todos, kind:to do, kind:to dos
Images -- kind:image, kind:images
Movies -- kind:movie, kind:movies
Music -- kind:music
Audio -- kind:audio
PDF -- kind:pdf, kind:pdfs
Preferences -- kind:system preferences, kind:preferences
Bookmarks -- kind:bookmark, kind:bookmarks
Fonts -- kind:font, kind:fonts
Presentations -- kind:presentations, kind:presentation