Slashdot Mirror
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."
Searching for stuff requires you to have organized it well in the first place. I haven't seen anything right out of the box from either Apple or Microsoft that's any more innovative than anybody else's butt out there.
This is the crappy pot calling the crappy kettle crappy.
-Jesse
Nothing says "unprofessional job" like wrinkles in your duct tape.
Computers are REALLY good at searching from the beginning of the book to the end. There's nothing wrong with searching that way for a modest number of documents.
Honestly, I put all my docs that I care about searching into a directory ~/docs and just run glimpse. It's been around since 1994, and is not some rinky dink program...it is a fast, indexed, search engine for your computer. It supports regular expressions (with limitations), as well as the usual keyword, date, etc. matching.
But all of this is to say: grep *is* modern, since glimpse is based on agrep. I really have a distaste for people that bash (no pun intended) the traditional UNIX tools because they are not "modern" or "advanced". That's specious - it's like saying that bash is "modern", but printf() is not. How the heck do you think bash prints things to the screen? Everytime we try to start from the ground up building a new "modern" tool and ignore the *real* tools, we do ourselves an injustice, and we waste time. There's no point in throwing away everything we've done that worked up until now. We should be using the "old" tools to build more sophisticated ones.
In 10 years, all your "modern" tools will fall by the wayside, but we'll still have grep and glimpse, and perhaps the next generation built on those two. Google Desktop search and Longhorn Search (if it's out yet) and Spotlight will be rewritten 5 times, but the basic tools for searching, like grep, will always be relevant.
This, of course, applies in a much broader context. The UNIX philosophy of creating basic tools and using them in concert to create larger, more complex tools is echoed in good software development practices, and in both cases, it is The Right Way.