With the revamped Spotlight in OS X Yosemite, the old keyboard shortcuts to do useful things within a spotlight search have been changed. So, if you’re using a version of OS X earlier than Yosemite, this post probably isn’t going to be that useful for you: for reference, here’s an article with the older shortcuts for older versions.
For Yosemite, new Spotlight keyboard shortcuts are available. The complete list is here, but I’ll include three useful ones that I use often directly in this post.
- ⌥-⌘-space: open new Finder window with search field selected. See this post for how to ensure it defaults to “This mac” rather than searching a single folder.
- ⌘-↑ or ⌘-↓: jump from one category of results to the next.
- ⌘-R or ⌘-double-click: open the folder containing the selected item in a Finder window. In OS 10.4-10.9 this used to be available in a right-click context menu on each item: finding this alternative was the motivation for this post.
Hacks for Macs 
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