Apple and MS Battle For Desktop Search Supremacy

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."

Comments

Uh...OS 8.5

[Wyatt Earp]

Wasn't Sherlock on 8.5 the first "desktop search" tool? For the Apple/Windows fight, or did it get web intergration with 9? It's been so long ago I forgot.

What about Beagle?

[Xpilot]

We can currently download Beagle for open source operating systems and desktops, and it's already somewhat usable. It's written in C# and requires Mono, and I think it's one of the killer apps for OSS too. We've also see it ported to Windows so things are getting very interesting here.

So between Spotlight and Longhorn and Google and Beagle, it's not just a 2-way battle :)

Re:They both suck

[dcclark]

I'm not sure where that's coming from. I can't speak for Longhorn's search features, but Spotlight (in OS X 10.4) will search based on contents, file name, and tons of metadata. You could toss your files onto your hard disk in any random way you want, and it would be equally efficient at searching as if you had organized it in a more human-friendly way.

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.

Uhh, BeOS LiveQueries?

[ikewillis]

How about BeOS LiveQueries, created by Dominique Giampaolo who would later be hired by Apple to develop Spotlight?

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:Uhh, GOOGLE?

[dgatwood]

Sherlock, AFAIK, only indexed text and text-like files, and treated them as an amorphous blob of text. It did so crudely through nightly scrapes of the entire hard drive, which most users tended to... um... cancel....

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.