For some searches, Spotlight shows strange top hits. I often want to open the "Sound" System Preferences pane using Spotlight. But when I type sound
it always shows "DaftCloud for SoundCloud" from the App Store as the top hit. I have never intentionally chosen this item. I have probably hit it a couple of times by mistake, but the vast majority of the time, I navigate one step down using the keyboard and choose "Sound". I rarely listen to music, and never to "DaftCloud" and I never use "SoundCloud". This top hit is weird to me. (Is Apple selling top hits on Spotlight?)
I have seen claims that Spotlight can "learn" from user behavior. This doesn't seem to be the case here. I have even intentionally opened "Sound" repeatedly using Spotlight, and it still shows "SoundCloud" first.
Interestingly, typing soun
(without the final d
) shows the "Sound" preference pane first, but as soon as I complete the word sound
, it switches to "SoundCloud". (Again, is Apple selling the "sound" keyword?)
Anyway, I want the "Sound" preference pane to be the top hit for sound
. Is there any way to achieve this?
I have explored the Spotlight "Search Results" settings. But they don't seem to offer a way to remove App Store suggestions. I cannot remove "Applications" because that will remove the "Sound" preferences from the results.
Some sources claim that I should be able to drag around the "Search Results" in settings, but they don't move for me.
I can force "Sound" preferences to the top by using the search query kind:system preferences sound
, but that is absurdly long to type.
soun
. I mostly use Alfred rather than Spotlight - it more predictable, but needs more work to configure.sound
to reach the "Sound" pane. I don't pause after every keystroke to check the result, and I don't want to have to learn special abbreviations likesoun
forsound
. I wouldn't call it expected "learning" to consistently ignore that I always choose the second result rather than the first.