Apple and MS Battle For Desktop Search Supremacy 707
markmcb writes "As Microsoft and Apple go back and forth about who came up with what idea first, it's been hard to tell who the real innovaters are. Michael Gartenberg and Jim Allchin of Microsoft give some fair opinions on the current desktop search battle. While they do give credit to Apple's iTunes for search inspiration and to Apple being first out of the box in the OS race, they both imply that Microsoft will provide more robust features with the release of Longhorn."
Uh...OS 8.5 (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Uhh, GOOGLE? (Score:5, Informative)
What about Beagle? (Score:5, Informative)
So between Spotlight and Longhorn and Google and Beagle, it's not just a 2-way battle
Re:Uhh, GOOGLE? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:They both suck (Score:5, Informative)
Ideally, if you can't remember what you called the document, then maybe you can remember a few key words from its contents, the approximate day when you created it, some metadata such as "photo taken at the Mackinaw Bridge" or something like that.
So while this may not be groundbreakingly new, I think that Spotlight really will provide USEFUL features. Based on what I've seen in previews and whatnot, it would be extremely useful to have an always-ready and always-accessible search feature which can handle metadata easily.
Copernic Desktop Search (Score:2, Informative)
Makes finding files or email messages a breeze.
Neither of them were first! (Score:5, Informative)
Uhh, BeOS LiveQueries? (Score:5, Informative)
Spotlight is largely an improvement on the ideas he developed with LiveQueries, adding natural language metadata searching to an OS that's pro-actively metadata oriented in the first place.
If anything, everyone else copied BeOS... the real difference is Spotlight is available to the public at the end of the month. With WinFS, who can say? 2007? 2008? 2009?
The open source world can look forward to Spotlight-like functionality once Beagle and inotify mature, the only real drawbacks are that it's currently rather unstable and written in .NET/Mono
Re:What about google's desktop search? (Score:2, Informative)
(Oh I tried the MSN search tool as well, but found Copernic superior to that as well)
Magellan lives on as X1 (Score:5, Informative)
It is quite good, and worth looking at, especially if you were a Magellan fan.
Re:They both suck (Score:3, Informative)
Actually, you're kind of wrong (Score:4, Informative)
Really wrong.
1. The user does not have to organize the contents. At all.
2. Almost all metadata, except the one example you picked, requires no user action or intervention. Things like the contents of a textual document (text files, word documents, spreadsheets, PDFs, email messages, bookmarks, etc.) Things like the properties of a file (larger or smaller than a given size, created before, after, or during a time, etc.) Things like the properties of image files (all CMYK files of type X with resolution Y, etc.)
The ONLY thing you have to add keyword metadata to manually is pictures.
So, in sum, you're completely wrong.
Comment removed (Score:4, Informative)
Re:I don't get it (Score:3, Informative)
Re:I don't get it (Score:3, Informative)
Re:This article drove me nuts (Score:5, Informative)
Basically everything you said here is wrong.
Ever since Panther, we've had a thing called Search Kit. (The technology behind Search Kit goes farther back than that.) Search Kit would index the contents of readable files, meaning plain text, and allow you to search them.
It was slow, it wasn't extensible, and it wasn't modular.
Spotlight is completely different. Spotlight has a content-search component, but it also has a metadata-search component, and both are linked to data through modular pieces of code called importers. Each importer is associated with one or more file types. When a file of a given type changes on disk (is written to, moved or created), the Spotlight import task (mdimport) calls the relevant importer(s) to re-index the file. These importers are very simple and run very fast. Even on old hardware, the overhead of Spotlight indexing isn't noticeable, in large part because it runs at a very low priority.
So Spotlight is really something new. It's ubiquitous and it's modular and it's fast.
Microsoft's search technology looks strikingly similar on paper. Problem is it only exists on paper.
Re:And the winner is (Score:3, Informative)
Did you know that Dominic Giampaolo, one of the file system gurus from Be, now works at Apple? you can even download a book he wrote about file systems from his web page [nobius.org].
Cool!
Some mentioned Beagle, I'll mention Tenor (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Dunno... (Score:4, Informative)
- Give me the 25 most frequently played songs by either Spears, Beyonce, or Aguilera, added in the past 6 months, that are longer than 3 mins but shorter than 5.
Bam you have the list. And auto-updates as you add new songs and as time moves on.
Now imagine the same thing for the entire OS.
Smart Mailbox, Smart folders.
Even though Windows 98 has a really weak "Find" too, I use it everyday at work by dumping all my documents in "My Documents", and use search to find the file I want instead of going through folders, and scrolling hundreds of files.
Re:Uhh, GOOGLE? (Score:5, Informative)
Don't expect Microsoft's new file system to be available before 2010. At this point nobody knows what form it will take. WinFS has been kicked around for about a decade now and nothing has come of it, so Microsoft may choose to make incremental improvements to NTFS instead of going the database-driven route.
More like OS 6 + On Location (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Uhh, GOOGLE? (Score:5, Informative)
Spotlight indexes every file on your system for which there's a scraping agent (I forget the correct term). And companies can create those agents for their own file formats and tag all sorts of metadata about files in addition to the raw text content.
For example, if your word processor supports a structured title page (i.e. if it knows who the author is, what the title is, etc.), and if there's an agent that understands its file format, you could do a spotlight query that searched specifically for any file where the author was "Anonymous Coward".
More importantly, after the initial indexing pass (where applicable), spotlight doesn' index files nightly like Sherlock. Spotlight knows when you've been sleeping, it knows when you're awake, it knows when you change files a bit, and keeps its index up-to-date. :-)
Comparing Spotlight to Sherlock is a lot like comparing an RSS-enhanced version of Google to the old world-wide-web worm.... It's an entirely different animal altogether.
Re:No Contest! (Score:3, Informative)
I mean, if you're going to be accurate, let's be accurate.
Re:Indexing every file built into the OS is new (Score:2, Informative)
He's an Apple software engineer, and gives a good insight into exactly what Spotlight can do.
It's not just searching by content, and it's not just the metadata that we've known for ages.
I'd elaborate, but he's already explained it much better.
Re:Search Technology (Score:3, Informative)
Spotlight can do this.
What about Excel files printed in the last week? Spotlight can do this too.
Or dog photos added to Pages documents that were subsequently sent to a friend?
With a little image metadata ("it's a dog") Spotlight can do this as well.
Organisation is great, but it's only giving you one part of the picture. Spotlight also tracks what you've done with those files, allowing you to effectively search your usage history *as well as* the file contents/names/etc.
Re:Uhh, GOOGLE? (Score:4, Informative)
If I'm not mistaken, Apple is using Core Data's sqlite interface to manage the metadata, so they're doing almost exactly what you are proposing.
Re:hey, dumbass (Score:3, Informative)
So Spotlight isn't as good as Longhorn? Care to explain to me their strengths and weaknesses? Can you provide me with a screenshot or two? The story linked to in this article is no good, it tells of things that Apple already has, and leaves out details on the search technology.