Slashdot Mirror
Desktop Search Engines Compared
nutterButter writes "After Google created a stir with its desktop search engine, other engines gained more awareness in the public eye. Slate did a comparison of them and Google was not their top pick; Copernic was. I tried it - and am quite impressed."
No, its got a pretty interface. To be accpeted by the linux crowd, it needs to be "GREP" with a combination of C, perl, shell scrip, and awk. Oh, and better be availble in RPM, tar.gz, and .deb. And it surely better use MySQL as a backend, with apache as the gui (if your going to have one.) We unix geeks like to demonstrate our knowledge by always doing things the hard way!
What are we going to do tonight Brain?
Maybe it is just me, but for home users, is a tool like this really necessary?
If you do not put things in directories, and are really disorganized, I suppose it would be, but I suspect that most people are at least somewhat organized when it comes to computer files...
Then again, my perception may be skewed, since most people I come in contact with who use computers a lot are my college friends, and they are all pretty computer literate.
The search that comes with Windows XP is a)ungodly slow b)often unable to find what you need and c)only searches file names. It can't search within chat transcripts, e-mails, or documents. Even if it could, Windows search does a terrible job of arranging the results once they have been found. There is great potential to improve upon the current local search.
So, do you trust your OS vendor? If so, why, exactly? For that matter, do you really trust your antivirus vendor?
-- Old Man Kensey
If you run a good enough system you would be running a firewall that would prevent the application from making any outgoing connections and then it won't invade anything. Then if you get scared at some point just find where the tool stores the data and delete it.
Every try using windows search to locate some piece of source code? Using Windows to find a document containing some piece of text is not very good. If you are just looking for a file named yyy or even *.jpg it is somewhat ok, but even then it has to traverse your entire directory structure.
.mp3. That is going to be alot of disk access, so I hope you defragged your hard drive lately so that the File allocation table is all residing in one section, if not it is going to be awhile.
This means that if you want to find all mp3's on your in the twenty different file sharing programs, and didn't have the foresight to organize them all into one set of directories. Than windows is going to search every file and check if it matches the extension
The google search tool (and I assume others) keep an indexed structure of your files for fast and intelligent searching.
It would be likely searching an entire SQL table for a record when really the record you want should be indexed to allow quick lookup.
This may not be an issue if microsoft and Apple get their relational file systems implemented. I am pretty sure Microsofts system is far away though, although I think I heard apple and linux are closer.
slate is already sold to washington post. . and here
Even the sale of Slate notwithstanding, the journalistic independence Slate had was quite admirable on the part of MS; few companies would keep a news source like that on a looser leash.
Slate was very critical of MS during the anti-trust trial, has been reasonably critical of their software (even going so far, as another user mentioned, as to reccomend Firefox).
If there is *anything* that my computer can do for me, why would I want to do it myself?
Maybe you don't trust Microsoft, but indexing and personal agents technologies are the futur.
Don't have a closed mind.
To tell you the truth, I'm very glad that these sorts of companies don't yet write software for Linux. A free software solution like Beagle comes without spyware, doesn't send your information to their corporate masters, and doesn't shove ads down your throat or charge you money.
Someday I'm sure that these crapware vendors will be producing their garbage for Linux, and dumb Linux users will be plagued with much the same sort of problems that windows users suffer today. It's almost a golden age now, knowing that the vast majority of Linux software is truly free libre software instead of the ugliness that freeware software will bring.
501 Not Implemented
Pays to have a capable OS...
tombox ~ # lspci | grep -i brooktree
0000:00:09.0 Multimedia video controller: Brooktree Corporation Bt878 Video Capture (rev 02)
0000:00:09.1 Multimedia controller: Brooktree Corporation Bt878 Audio Capture (rev 02)
From this I know I have a 878 and I would read the appropriate PDF [or grep the net since google would have the PDF index anyways]...
I AM THE GENIOUS!
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
Someday I'm sure that these crapware vendors will be producing their garbage for Linux, and dumb Linux users will be plagued with much the same sort of problems that windows users suffer today
Of course they will. Like them or loathe them, the adware authors are doing it for money, and so target the OS with the largest install base (all other things being equal). Once Linux or MacOS has a more appreciable market share, they'll be targetted too.
Yes, Windows is more vulnerable to remote/local exploits, but that's not what we're talking about here - we're talking about trojans, malware-riddled software and other stuff that requires user intervention to get on to a system. If the hordes ever descend on Linux, so will the malware.
It's official. Most of you are morons.