Googlie Oogile Desktop

[willstay]

After reading AnandTech review on OS X Tiger, I wondered why Microsoft never realized need of global Indexing on its OS. It came as a surprize to me that it HAS Indexing Services which I never cared to use before. More than curious how it would work, I started indexing services on both my XP and Win 2003. For hours this service just jiggles away clock cycles making OS run like tortoise while indexing. Ah!! and you have to Start->Search->select couple of options and finally you are searching; if you want to play smart, you need to learn MS version of searching language; and on top of that, searching is slower than Google doing the same thing around World Wide Web. (And I never figured how search can be performed with web browser as mentioned in help page).

I landed over this Google-Desktop ( http://desktop.google.com ). It just completed around 40% of indexing without making me feel like snail; and is already showing google speed over my contents - it searches keywords in around 0.01 seconds!! It doesn't just stop here, you can use familiar google searching syntaxes.

This really is checkmate over Tiger OS X's global indexing.

 

[dawks]

Microsoft has 'copied' Apple, and a fancy search service will be provided in Longhorn..

And Microsoft already has a desktop search program provided via its MSN Group. In this case, Microsofts product works better then Googles, IMO.

 

[Childs]

I don't think you know what Spotlight really does. Spotlight searches metadata.

Anyways, I don't know how this is checkmate, being that Spotlight runs on OSX and Google's Desktop search doesn't run on OSX.

 

[Alex]

Originally posted by: Childs
I don't think you know what Spotlight really does. Spotlight searches metadata.

Anyways, I don't know how this is checkmate, being that Spotlight runs on OSX and Google's Desktop search doesn't run on OSX.

spotlight is also way more powerful than google desktop search IMO

 

[hopejr]

Spotlight also is part of the OS with hooks into the Kernel (if not part of it already - not sure though), not a 3rd party add in like Google Desktop search.

I've been using spotlight instead of launchbar now. Pretty cool.

 

[Childs]

Originally posted by: franguinho

Originally posted by: Childs
I don't think you know what Spotlight really does. Spotlight searches metadata.

Anyways, I don't know how this is checkmate, being that Spotlight runs on OSX and Google's Desktop search doesn't run on OSX.

spotlight is also way more powerful than google desktop search IMO

It is in regards to searching metadata, but its unreliable when doing basic filename searches. I'm sure it'll be fixed in an SU, but as it is now I can't use it, except in certain apps like Mail.

 

[willstay]

I appreciate for letting me know more search(indexing) methods/tools. Let me try them one by one. Hope AnandTech takes all of them to their sophisticated test bed.

 

[hopejr]

I got really annoyed with Spotlight today. I was trying to search for something in the unix directories, and it wouldn't find it (yet I knew it was there). When I had Panther, I could do those sort of searches fine, but this sucks. I even tried pressing cmd+F in Finder and tried to do the same as in Panther, and it still didn't find it AAAGGGHHH!

 

[daniel1113]

Originally posted by: dawks
Microsoft has 'copied' Apple, and a fancy search service will be provided in Longhorn..

This has been slated for Longhorn for a long time. Plus, I wouldn't use the term "copying" since every company in every industry naturally adopts methods and designs that work well.