What is Sherlock?

Sherlock is the file and web-searching utility built into Mac OS 8, 9 and early versions of X. Sherlock has advanced searching capabilities allowing you to search by file name, and by file content so you can quickly locate lost or misplaced files.Sherlock can also search the web with the use of plugins. Web-searches use multiple search engines to scour the internet for the information you need, resulting in a list of results ranked by relevance.

When Sherlock was still maintained and plugins still worked you could perform searches for eBay listings, stock prices, news, movie theater schedules, and an almost endless amount of other options.

Sherlock Revival!

As of 2021 Sherlock web searches have been broken for over 13 years. This is largely due to companies/websites abandoning their plugins and search engine support, and Apple subsequently dropping Sherlock in future Mac OS releases.

Thanks to the user/admin Knez of Macintosh Garden, several patched versions of Sherlock have been released to enable web searching again. These patches bypass some Apple checks that lead to frequent error messages, and fixed the auto-update function for plugins in Sherlock 2.

You can download these modified versions from Macintosh Garden.

How to install the patched Sherlock application

1. Download the application pack from Macintosh Garden- Replace the existing Sherlock application on your computer.
2. Delete any folders with the word Sherlock in your Preferences folder (HD > System Folder > Preferences)- For Sherlock 2, Delete the 'Channel Data' and 'Selected Sites' files in the folder 'My Channel' found in the 'Internet Seach Sites' folder (HD > System Folder > Internet Seach Sites) if they exist.

Installing new plugins

Sherlock uses channels to categorize and group different web searches. You can create channels within Sherlock and drag search sites between channels to create customised results. You can also manually edit channels and plugins by going to your Hard Drive > System Folder > Internet Search Sites. Within this directory you will see channels as folders, and plugins as the files within channels.

1. For Sherlock 1, put the plugins you want to use in the folder 'Internet Seach Sites' (HD > System Folder > Internet Seach Sites). Your installed plugins can be found under the Search Internet tab.
2. For Sherlock 2, Choose the channel that looks like a hat with a magnifying glass next to it, this is the My Channel channel. The channel should start populating itself with the latest available plugins automatically. If not you can manually add channels to the channel folders in the 'Internet Seach Sites' folder (HD > System Folder > Internet Seach Sites).