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Apple and MS Battle For Desktop Search Supremacy

Posted by Zonk on from the struggle-of-the-titans dept.

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."

70 of 707 comments (clear)

  1. No Contest! by BandwidthHog · · Score: 5, Funny

    Windows XP keeps your desktop from becoming overly clutterled with icons you haven't used recently, which makes searching your desktop *much* easier. Clearly, they are the TRUE innova[tt]ors here.

    And if that's not enough, the second core should drastically improve that little doggie's performance.

    --

    Quantum materiae materietur marmota monax si marmota monax materiam possit materiari?
    1. Re:No Contest! by RatPh!nk · · Score: 5, Funny

      Well it seems obvious. Ben and Hoss need to head on up to Redmond and get us our horse back, if you know what I mean.

      And by horse, I mean a usable OS
      And by get back I mean, shoot some people
      :)
      --
      Argh. The laws of science be a harsh mistress.
    2. Re:No Contest! by Moofie · · Score: 3, Informative

      If by "Apple however did "borrow" ideas from Xerox" you mean that "Apple paid licensing money to use Xerox's R&D ideas as the basis for Apple's tremendous user-interface investment", yes.

      I mean, if you're going to be accurate, let's be accurate.

      --
      Why yes, I AM a rocket scientist!
    3. Re:No Contest! by Baricom · · Score: 3, Funny

      It does the same thing I used to do as a kid - hide the mess in a corner where nobody would see it.

  2. Uhh, GOOGLE? by Eric(b0mb)Dennis · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Uhh--- the first real mainstream desktop search I started to see people use was...

    Google Desktop Search?

    --
    Excuse me, I don't mean to impose, but I am the ocean
    1. Re:Uhh, GOOGLE? by Iphtashu+Fitz · · Score: 4, Informative

      Actually Apple had a desktop search as part of the Mac OS at least as far back as 1998. I forget what it was called but it came with a bunch of pre-defined search sites and you could download and add plugins from other sites as well. It was part of the OS search feature, though, and not a plug-in to a web browser.

    2. Re:Uhh, GOOGLE? by Amiga+Lover · · Score: 5, Insightful

      This I find interesting too.

      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.

      The same thing was being said before the release of Panther. The strengths of longhorn were touted and Panther was conceded as being "admittedly out first, but longhorn will be better". Now 18 months later we have Tiger that is 'admittedly out first, but longhorn will be better".

      I bet when Apple announce their next OS (let's call it Ocelot) the commentary in the media will again be...

      "Ocelot is admittedly out first, but longhorn will be better".

      Of course, the world will suck it up and nod their heads, agreeing that this fabled new version of Windows will be better, sometime in the future, while ignoring the last half decade of "admittedly good" OS X versions which ACTUALLY EXIST AND CAN BE USED!

    3. Re:Uhh, GOOGLE? by jafac · · Score: 4, Funny

      No shit, Sherlock. :)

      --

      These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
    4. Re:Uhh, GOOGLE? by Morgahastu · · Score: 4, Insightful

      This reminds me of then the Dreamcast came out. Most people didn't buy it because the PS2 "would be better". Thing is that the PS2 came out a year and a half later and it wasn't better, the graphics were slightly poorer (IMHO) than the Dreamcast and it was over a year late.

    5. Re:Uhh, GOOGLE? by Flyboy+Connor · · Score: 4, Interesting
      I remember the same thing happening in 1994. OS/2 (I believe it was version 2.0, might have been a later version -- a good version of OS/2 anyway) was released, and Microsoft was struggling with building Windows 95. The most-read computer-mag in the Netherlands published an article that compared OS/2 to Windows 95. It explained in half a dozen pages why Windows 95 was MUCH better than OS/2. It was larded with screenshots from both OSses, those of OS/2 mainly consisting of a window opened in which a DOS-shell was run, while, of course, the Windows 95 screenshots showed cool icons. At the end of the article, in a very small font, it said that the author of this article was a Microsoft sales manager. I wrote the mag a letter of which the geste was, that it is easy to call a system faultless if it doesn't exist. I also ended my subscription, since it was clear to me they had "sold out".

      Of course, those that have followed Microsoft's career know that their basic strategy is always promising, if not guaranteeing, that the next version of their applications will be perfect. Amazingly, some users still believe this hogwash.

    6. Re:Uhh, GOOGLE? by timster · · Score: 4, Informative

      WinFS has been dropped from Longhorn as it won't be ready in time. Well, actually they dropped it and then came up with something else CALLED WinFS which has nothing to do with what you are talking about. The search in Longhorn is an index system just like Spotlight, and everything still runs on NTFS.

      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.

      --
      I have seen the future, and it is inconvenient.
    7. Re:Uhh, GOOGLE? by squiggleslash · · Score: 3, Insightful
      They're great but they don't search inside files.

      Actually what makes all of this interesting is that Apple and Microsoft are improving the search features so they're usable. Right now, for example, you wouldn't browse your hard drive using the search features of your OS: it's quicker to to to Documents/Essays/CMP101 and open "Data Hierarchies.doc" than it is to open Find File from start, look over the various criteria settings, enter words you know appear in the document, and hit Find.

      What Apple and Microsoft are doing is encouraging applications to create indexes that go with every file they create, so searching can just be a matter of going to a ubiquitous Search box and entering whatever it is you want to find. Within seconds, you'll have the files and objects that are relevent. You'll end up using it as your default way of finding documents, rather than navigating your file heirarchy.

      Less Exploring, more Finding. Ironic, in some ways.

      --
      You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
    8. Re:Uhh, GOOGLE? by topham · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Normally I would agree with your statement.

      But in this case the point isn't the user interface to the search capabilities. It is important, but not the technical issue.

      The technical issue is the filesystem / operating system has the necessary hooks to reduce the subjective overhead to zero.

      By having the hooks integrated such that indexing occurs when files are updated, moved, or otherwise changed the search capabilities are dynamic. It isn't necessary to scan the file system to detect changes, the changes are already known and the search query itself simply has to refresh. It doesn't scan the filesystem for the relevant files, it simply looks them up in it's index.

      I've used BeOS and I am hopeful Apple's Spotlight will match, or exceed BeOS' implementation. In my mind it is imposible for Microsoft to do it better, So I don't understand that part of the issue.

      I believe Apple is supplying the necessary tools and information so that a new file, created by an application can have it's filesystem details index, as well as call a custom routine to pull any application specific data from the file and have that indexed.

      Lets say you have a new word processor that stores it's data in a compressed format; a routine for the application could process the file and update the index with all the keywords, perhaps all the text, etc automatically.

      A third party company would have difficulty putting forth a standard for such a function, and would have to support the major applications themselves.

    9. Re:Uhh, GOOGLE? by dgatwood · · Score: 5, Informative
      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.

      --

      Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.

    10. Re:Uhh, GOOGLE? by ciroknight · · Score: 4, Interesting

      The fact is, I salute Microsoft for going this route.

      I've evaluated plenty of SQL filesystems, attempted to implement my own, and with mild success, ran and tested many implementations. Here's what I found out:

      SQL sucks as a filesystem. While it's great that SQL can store relations incredibly well, make finding files easier, and provide a good, intellegent backup system, its faults are with the implementation, every time.

      It requires the programmer to make two choices; "Do I want to include an entire SQL engine in kernel space, or leave it in user space?" and "Do I want the 'parsing agent' to run in user space or in kernel space?".

      To anyone who's ever worked with an SQL engine, the answer to the first question is obvious. If you move the entire SQL engine to kernel space, you're introducing kernel bloat in the size of 40-80 megabytes for the software itself (including caches, sql tables in ram, etc). But if you leave it in userspace, every user has to have their own copy of the software running for them, or your parser agent has to have a kernel hook that basically takes the input from the user accessing the file system, and redirect it to the SQL engine itself.

      The "Parsing Agent" as it were, is a piece of code that actually rips apart the files you send to it, grabbing the content's type, and any metadata it can filter out of the file. It can then use two seperate transfers to send the file to one table, and the metadata to another. When searching for a file, it simply queries the metadata, and matches a file index to the files located in the data cache. This is how almost all modern desktop search technologies work (Google Desktop Search, Spotlight, and whatever Windows Longhorn will have).

      The existance of a good parsing agent makes an SQL file system virtually irrelevant. I commend them for not wasting their time storing the whole files in an SQL database, but the metadata should be. That way, using a common API, all programs should be able to quickly find files they need to operate, making the file system more amorphous, and less rigid. Hell, if software engineers cared enough, we could get rid of the whole idea of a heirarchial file system now; simply tag incoming files with a UID, and write them to disk, making the "Parsing Agent" keep all of the metadata, and letting it deal with finding and opening files. You could have links on your desktop to commonly used searches "All files Containing the word 'Lyrics'" (a common one used during my tests).

      Really, I'd love to see what Apple has in store for Spotlight, but I definitely know that Windows Longhorn is better off without WinFS the way they originally planned it.

      --
      "Victory means exit strategy, and it's important for the President to explain to us what the exit strategy is." G.W.Bush
    11. Re:Uhh, GOOGLE? by JohnsonWax · · Score: 3, Informative

      "Really, I'd love to see what Apple has in store for Spotlight, but I definitely know that Windows Longhorn is better off without WinFS the way they originally planned it."

      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.

  3. What about google's desktop search? by MrAnnoyanceToYou · · Score: 3, Insightful

    I'm amazed to not see it in the blurb, considering the love affair with Google. I know it works better than 'find' for me.

    --
    My little site.
  4. empty promises... by utexaspunk · · Score: 4, Insightful

    they both imply that Microsoft will provide more robust features with the release of Longhorn.

    It's pretty easy to make empty promises with a product that won't even be released until next year. The point is, OSX has this feature NOW...

  5. Hmm... by daveschroeder · · Score: 3, Funny

    they both imply that Microsoft will provide more robust features with the release of Longhorn

    So, OS technology will have improved in 18-24 months?

    Amazing!

  6. Re:They both suck by KillerDeathRobot · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Searching for stuff requires you to have organized it well in the first place.

    No it doesn't. The point of searching is to bypass organization or to impose organization on data according to current needs.

    --
    Thinkin' Lincoln - a web comic of presidential proportions
  7. Dunno... by Quiet_Desperation · · Score: 3, Insightful
    I rarely search for files, and the current Mac OS X and WinXP search systems suffice. I guess I'm just not the target user type for this stuff.

    I just keep my hard drive carefully arranged and orderly. Folders are your friend. Nest them with wild abandon. I also print out any interesting info tidbits (stuff I know I'll reference multiple times) I find online, and put them in a couple large notebooks that I maintain.

    1. Re:Dunno... by aftk2 · · Score: 4, Interesting

      Yes, but see, that takes your time. It used to be (and still is, like in the system you describe above) that finding something on a computer required an investment of time: either that time was used beforehand, ensuring proper organization, or at the time of the search - wading through poorly organized folders, duplicates, old files, etc...

      But now, the promise of these tools - in theory - is that we can eliminate this investment of time. We can drop file wherever we want to, and the searching is instantaneous, by whatever bit of criteria we happen to need, conceive, or have access to, at the time of search.

      It's not perfect, though: I know that my sense of organization has devolved since I started using Quicksilver, and that is sometimes a problem, when I am forced to go manually through folders. Heh, who knows - maybe Apple will release some sort of Spotlight -> Automator transition that allows people to use spotlight queries to actually reorganize their data permanently, not smart folder this and query that, but actually reorganize data in the filesystem based on certain things (kind of like how iTunes manages the folders in its library folder.)

      --
      concrete5: a cms made for marketing, but strong enough for geeks.
    2. Re:Dunno... by badasscat · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Yeah, but think about it - with desktop search, if you want to go after a file, just type the name, or some content related to it.

      You can do this already with the search tools already built into Windows XP. Just type the name, part of the name, or search by type of file.

      I don't see that this new "desktop search" thing is going to do anything other than teach people how to be disorganized. So now you can put any file anywhere you want without even knowing where it physically is on a disk. Big deal. The point is the OS still knows where it is, and what happens when something invariably gets erased either through user error or a system crash? You erase a folder now and you (should) know exactly what's in it. With the system they're talking about, you'd just lose a bunch of random files and you'd be coming across stuff you didn't even know you'd lost years after the fact (you'd only figure it out when you actually searched for those files, and you'd probably wonder why the search function is not coming up with anything).

      I think the desktop metaphor not only still works fine, it is also necessary. There is real utility in knowing exactly where your OS thinks a file or folder really is - not just smart-search pseudo-folders that automatically update themselves based on your criteria (a neat idea, but this should be an addition to the desktop metaphor, not a replacement for it).

      Tweaks and helpful features are one thing, but there's no need to throw the baby out with the bathwater like MS is talking about here. I sincerely hope there will be an option to just keep using your system the way we always have.

      Remember how Windows XP turned off things like file extensions by default? Remember how the first thing you did when you got Windows XP, along with everybody else in the world, was to turn them back on? I feel like that's the sort of thing MS is trying to foist upon us again.

      New search functions are fine. But I don't need to learn a completely new way of doing things on the desktop. My desktop - and my PC - works perfectly well as it is.

    3. Re:Dunno... by PureCreditor · · Score: 3, Informative

      Ever tried Smart Playlists in iTunes ?

      - 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.

    4. Re:Dunno... by nathanh · · Score: 4, Funny
      - 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.

      ... aaaannnd DELETE.

      You're right, this is a useful feature!

  8. Uh...OS 8.5 by Wyatt+Earp · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

    1. Re:Uh...OS 8.5 by solios · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Web "integration" was there out of the box and was the Big Deal with Sherlock. It was such a Big Deal that it was integrated as a tab into the System-level "Find" command to augment it. Sherlock didn't search your hard drive, it searched the internets.

      Oh, and it had banner ads.

      This was nicely unobtrusive until OS 9, at which point Apple made Sherlock the Find command and replaced the simple, clean interface with the bloated "brushed metal" that we see to this day. Same functionality as previous incarnations with a more OMG TEH INTERNETS!!!! emphasis.

      Oh, and it had banner ads. AND it was big and ugly. So I hauled in my "sherlock" from 8.6 and used that with my powerbook until I switched over to OS X.

      And I didn't do that until they peeled Sherlock back into a separate app (that I've never launched on this machine) and left a useable Find in its place. Which we didn't have at all in between 8.6 and 10.2.

  9. And... by daveschroeder · · Score: 4, Insightful

    ...I'm sure that Apple won't have been doing anything in the meantime.

    Like, oh, working on Mac OS X 10.5.

    Which will, quite literally, probably be shipping around the time Longhorn ships.

  10. impromptu poll by spoonyfork · · Score: 3, Insightful
    Does anyone else out there consider themselves an above-average to power user and completely not care about the desktop search battle?

    I'm sure there are those that do care and think everyone else should too, and good for them, but I want to hear from those that don't care for whatever reason.

    --
    Speak truth to power.
    1. Re:impromptu poll by BandwidthHog · · Score: 3, Insightful

      And for the stuff that falls under multiple categories, which folder should that go in?

      [cue "but what about symlinks?" responses]

      --

      Quantum materiae materietur marmota monax si marmota monax materiam possit materiari?
    2. Re:impromptu poll by Otter · · Score: 5, Insightful
      Does anyone else out there consider themselves an above-average to power user and completely not care about the desktop search battle?

      I care, because knowing what utilities can and can't do, and how to take advantage of the former and cover up for the latter, is what makes me a "power user".

      --
      What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
  11. Search Technology by CastrTroy · · Score: 4, Insightful

    The best way I found to find files on my computer is to keep them organized. Keeping them organized allows me to find files without having to keep an index of what's on there, or worry about whether a certain program can tell what's actually in the file. In the end it all comes down to proper organization.

    --

    Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
    1. Re:Search Technology by GaryPatterson · · Score: 3, Informative

      So how do you search for (example) all images emailed to a family member in the two weeks before Christmas?

      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.

  12. ahem by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    'man find'

  13. What about Beagle? by Xpilot · · Score: 5, Informative

    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 :)

    --
    "Backups are for wimps. Real men upload their data to an FTP site and have everyone else mirror it." -- Linus Torvalds
  14. Why Mr. Allchin, what a big RDF you have! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    "Tiger is nice in that they've put search capability in a lot of places, but there's a lot more (in Longhorn)," Allchin said.

    Referring to an OS that is at least 15 months from release in the present tense is plain crazy, especially when comparing its features to those of an OS that will be on store shelves in 10 days. He might as well just say Longhorn will cure cancer and make your breath minty fresh while you use it. No matter what features it has, they're not doing anybody any good at 6PM on April 29th, 2005-- Tiger's will.

    1. Re:Why Mr. Allchin, what a big RDF you have! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Insightful

      "Referring to an OS that is at least 15 months from release in the present tense is plain crazy,"

      Not Really. Longhorn Beta 1 ships in just over a month, and the RTM date is set in May 2006.

      Yes, really. Until it's preloaded on systems, and in boxes on store shelves, and can be bought and used by the public at large, it doesn't exist. Betas don't count for shit, even if Microsoft says they're okay for use in a production environment (HA!). Neither does some RTM date that's more than a year away and not even remotely set in stone no matter what Microsoft says.

  15. Re:They both suck by MustardMan · · Score: 4, Interesting

    What, you mean like smart folders, that automatically detect when you add a new file of a certain type, anywhere on your hard drive, and add it to the virtual folder? Oops, Tiger has that.

    Smart folders WILL change the way you use your computer. There's no need to hunt through folders for a certain document, as all organization can be done at a smart folder level. Plainly put, it doesn't MATTER where your data is stored in the file structure, smart folders will allow you to organize everything easily and quickly. Just like file systems make it where you don't care where the bits lie on the disk, smart folders will make it where you don't care where the files lie in the directory structure. This is a BIG improvement.

    Of course, you didn't actually bother to think about the point you were attempting to make, because you were rushing to get your post near the beginning of the dicsussion so it could be modded up.

  16. Microsoft has delivered in the past. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    Windows 95 brought us far more features than Macintosh 84.

    1. Re:Microsoft has delivered in the past. by globalar · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Some people really believe that Windows is pretty up to par with OSX and will go after this point. Check out these comments from ComputerWorld (poor magazine IMO). For record, I don't like the magazine or agree with any of this:

      "Mac OS X may be a nice-looking overlay to Unix, but it still leaves much to be desired. For example, networking in an environment where multiple servers are used is decidedly flaky, permissions must be changed to do simple things like adding fonts or nonstandard printers, and administrative access is difficult."

      "...the view from the trenches is that Windows will be the way to go until an OS that is as user- and admin-friendly comes around."

      And another:

      "A couple of years after the release of Win 95, I attended an Apple event celebrating the new features in Mac OS 8.0. As I sat watching this operating system version that offered full-screen wallpaper (a feature of Win 3.1), Internet options (catching up with Win 95), systemwide sound effects (another Win 3.1 feature) and more, I said to the longtime Mac user sitting beside me that this was Apple's attempt to maintain parity with Windows 95."

  17. Re:They both suck by dcclark · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

  18. Re:Microsoft always steals features by Quiet_Desperation · · Score: 5, Funny
    BUT, they implement them better than anyone else.

    With the exception of GUI design, networking, popup menus, text rendering, web standards, file systems, security, user friendliness, software licensing agreements, programming languages, feature creep/application bloat and general business practices.

    Other than those things they're great! :)

  19. Neither of them were first! by Trixter · · Score: 4, Informative

    Anyone here old enough to remember Lotus Magellan? If any company or product could be considered first in the desktop search category, it would be Magellan. Released in the late 1980s, it indexed every file on your hard drive into Btrees; when you searched for a term, it would narrow the results in realtime with every keystroke -- blazingly fast. Found files were displayed (many looking just like they would in their native program thanks to several file type filters) with the search word highlighted. Truly one of the MS-DOS highlights of the 1980s.

  20. Re:Why a desktop search tool? by izomiac · · Score: 3, Interesting

    My guess is that Joe Average can't remember if he saved Important.doc to C:\, C:\My Documents, C:\Documents and Settings\JAverage\My Documents, N:\, or to the Start Menu/whereever else inexperienced users tend to save things.

  21. Well, THIS sure is helpful... by Twon · · Score: 5, Interesting

    "Instead of being a static graphic indicating the type of document a file is, an icon in Longhorn will be a smaller representation of the first page of a document." ... so I'll have to read the filenames carefully if I'm trying to grab all the .pdf's I've made of my Word documents if they're in the same directory! Wheee, thanks!

  22. And the winner is by FidelCatsro · · Score: 4, Interesting

    BeOS , it had file metadata support years ago and worked well with it .
    not to mention the other companys that have since been making products of this nature .in an MS vs apple fight since Tiger comes out in 10 days and longhorn comes out god knows when, its pretty one sided and apple wins hands down

    --
    The only things certain in war are Propaganda and Death. You can never be sure which is which though
    1. Re:And the winner is by pianophile · · Score: 3, Informative

      BeOS , it had file metadata support years ago and worked well with it .

      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.

      Cool!

      --

      'Your brain is God.' -- Dr. Timothy Leary
  23. Uhh, BeOS LiveQueries? by ikewillis · · Score: 5, Informative
    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

  24. Let's peek in on GENIUS at work. by hey! · · Score: 3, Funny

    Engineer 1 (GENIUS): Wow, these 100GB hard disks sure hold a lot of data.

    Engineer 2: Yeah, I know, half the time I can't find a file I made a few days ago.

    Engineer 1 (GENIUS): Well, these are computers after, all, wouldn't it be nice if there were some way to actually search for your data?

    Engineer 2: Well, there's that cute puppy thingy.

    Engineer 1 (GENIUS): No I mean a way that didn't suck.

    Engineer 2: *** dumbstruck ***

    Manager: Quick, call the patent attorneys!

    --
    Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
  25. They're not empty promises by RLW · · Score: 4, Funny

    Microsoft has been the *best* and *truest* inovator of the MS Windows desktop (and of MS Windows OSes for that matter) the world has ever seen. Nobody puts more features in to MS windows applications than anybody else. True it does borrow some ideas from *completely* unrelated fields (such as OSX for instance). But putting those features into MS Windows is the real litmus test of MS Windows OS inovation.

    1. Re:They're not empty promises by BandwidthHog · · Score: 5, Funny

      Nobody puts more features in to MS windows applications than anybody else.

      You might be right, but those guys at Gator/Claria sure gave 'em a run for their money.

      --

      Quantum materiae materietur marmota monax si marmota monax materiam possit materiari?
  26. Magellan lives on as X1 by micron · · Score: 4, Informative

    Most of the guys who wrote Magellan got back together and released a new desktop search package called X1. http://www.x1.com

    It is quite good, and worth looking at, especially if you were a Magellan fan.

    1. Re:Magellan lives on as X1 by Your+Pal+Dave · · Score: 4, Interesting
      And the free Yahoo! desktop search is based on X1:

      About Yahoo! Desktop Search
      Yahoo! Desktop Search Beta
      Yahoo! Desktop Search 1.0
      Build 1500zk
      Copyright © 2003-2005 Yahoo! Inc. and X1 Technologies, Inc.

      All Rights Reserved. Patents Pending.

      Outside In® Viewer and Content Access Technology © 1991-2004 Stellent Chicago, Inc.
      All Rights Reserved.

      Click here to try Enterprise Desktop Search from X1.


  27. This just in... by SoupIsGood+Food · · Score: 5, Funny

    This just in! Microsoft downplays competitor's achievement with a promise of better functionality in a vaporware product! Film at 11!

    SoupIsGood Food

  28. Re:They both suck by jafac · · Score: 4, Funny

    That scares me.

    If Smart Folders detect porn, and put all my porn into one folder, then I'll literally have a hundred thousand files in one folder. I doubt Finder, Explorer, or Nautilus can handle browsing such a beast.

    Unless; Smart Folders can automatically put my porn into; Readheads, Asian, Lesbian, Threesomes, Celebrities, etc. . . .

    --

    These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
  29. Re:empty vaporware promises... by DickBreath · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Vaporware will always be better than a shipping product. Just go back through history looking at every vaporware announcement just in the 20th century alone. "My vaporware product will do everything Joe's shipping software does, plus X and Y and Z! So don't buy the currently shipping product. Wait for my vaporware."

    Maybe it is time to change that old IBM joke into a Microsoft joke. You know,the one where Ballmer/Gates/et.all just sit on the edge of the bed telling her how good it is going to be, but they never do anything. Wish I could remember that joke.

    --

    I'll see your senator, and I'll raise you two judges.
  30. Magic Icons. by zkn · · Score: 4, Interesting

    "However, its implementation(Apples) is not as universal as what Microsoft is proposing."

    So what does this really mean? Apple already does this but Microsoft promises to NOT ONLY do exactly the same, but have improved uppon the ideer by their next release.

    We have an OS versus a Proposal. How can it be they declare the proposal the winner? By that time chances are OSX will have evolved just a tad bit. It takes less time to develop a feature already implimenten then it does starting from the bottom. Even if you do have somthing to copycat.

  31. Actually, you're kind of wrong by daveschroeder · · Score: 3, Informative

    No, scratch that.

    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.

  32. This article drove me nuts by Pecisk · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Totally 'Microsoft PR', nothing more.

    First of all, OS X and Mac OS had a superb search FOR ages which works VERY good. Windows search compare to that is a JOKE. Spotlight is just more branded and search more metadata and gives it in more user friendly form. But as search on my OS X stations I just click on input where i start to type file name which I look for and...whola! there it is.

    And second - Longhorn is 3 YEARS still to go! It is like middle ages for history! For christ sakes, Microsoft must be desperate to push such PR stunt like this.

    And yeah, as open source advocat, I have to say that Beagle will certanly rock the world too - because it is actively developed and pushed by Novel/Ximian guys. And of coarse, let's not forget king of the hill in search now - Google.

    And if it is not paid article - however it looks like - then it is such "we just love Microsoft" style press which I simply can't stand anymore.

    --
    user@ubuntubox:~$ stfu This server is going down for shutdown NOW!
    1. Re:This article drove me nuts by As+Seen+On+TV · · Score: 4, Informative

      First of all, OS X and Mac OS had a superb search FOR ages which works VERY good. Windows search compare to that is a JOKE. Spotlight is just more branded and search more metadata and gives it in more user friendly form.

      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.

  33. Comment removed by account_deleted · · Score: 3, Informative

    Comment removed based on user account deletion

  34. Re:I don't get it by fribhey · · Score: 3, Informative

    because OS X's spotlight searches INSIDE of files and meta tags. it can search inside email messages (not just search but subject or sender) and can search inside of word docs, pdfs, mp3s, etc etc. current search tools in only search file names/types/dates. Mac OS X Tiger indexes every file on the hard drive so search results will be instantaneous as you type. read about spotlight here to see why it is a big deal vs. current search tools: http://www.apple.com/macosx/features/spotlight/

    --
    / http://suffocate.us
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  35. In Gaming News by r00td43m0n · · Score: 5, Funny

    In Gaming News.
    Duke Nukem Forever will be better than Half Life 2.

  36. Re:They both suck by As+Seen+On+TV · · Score: 3, Interesting

    No, iTunes will keep its own database for the obvious reason: It's cross-platform. We have to ship an iTunes for Windows, which means we have to have an internal database anyway.

    iTunes 5 will get the benefits of the souped-up V100 database, though, so searching will be even faster. (This won't affect you unless you have hundreds of thousands of songs in your library.)

  37. 3 words - locate | grep by gosand · · Score: 3, Insightful
    How do I search? I use "locate", "|", and "grep". That's it. OK, sometimes I use "which" and "find". But I don't even have to use these very often, because I organize my work.

    Why is desktop search such a big deal again? Are people just writing files to random locations on their hard drives? Even when I have to use Windows at work, I put things in logical places so I don't have to search for them.

    --

    My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.

  38. Some mentioned Beagle, I'll mention Tenor by pointwood · · Score: 3, Informative

    It's the Contextual Linkage Engine that will be part of KDE4. They got some pretty cool ideas which you can read about in that article and also in the comments.

    1. Re:Some mentioned Beagle, I'll mention Tenor by double-oh+three · · Score: 4, Funny

      If you confuse Contextual Linkage engine with "Trappist Westvleteren 12 (Yellow Cap)", which is a type of beer, you're either way too drunk or very extremely not drunk, so much so you've gone through the other side and have emerged into drunkeness.

      I think you were trying to point here.

      --
      "For years, I struggled with reality... but I'm happy to say I finally won out over it." -- Elwood P. Dowd
  39. Battle... by taskforce · · Score: 3, Insightful
    While there's a true battle of the OSes with regards to features, (Tiger and Longhorn are both very good OSes from what I've seen) that battle is for individuals to make up their mind on, not market forces.

    Surely nobody can realistically believe that there's going to be a real battle of numbers in the same way there is for games consoles/competing digital disk formats etc?

    I don't know the exact figures, but I do know that Windows gets about the same number of new users each year as Mac OS has in there entire installed base... No matter how good Mac OS is (and I'm sure it's very good) it's not like we don't know with infinity+1:1 odds which OS is going to be the most widely adopted?

    --
    My 3D Texturing Skinning work (under construction)
  40. Re:empty vaporware promises... by netringer · · Score: 4, Funny
    Vaporware will always be better than a shipping product. Just go back through history looking at every vaporware announcement just in the 20th century alone. "My vaporware product will do everything Joe's shipping software does, plus X and Y and Z! So don't buy the currently shipping product. Wait for my vaporware."
    It's gets even better than that.

    I remember an actual quote from a Microsoft executive (Ballmer?) many years ago along the lines of, "They just copied what we're going to have to the next version of..." something.

    That's a statement you have to go to Bizarro World to parse.
    --
    Ever dream you could fly? Get up from the Flight Sim. I Fly
  41. That joke... by NanoProf · · Score: 4, Funny

    Three women are discussing how their husbands make love. The first says, "My husband is a footbal player. He is really powerful and energetic in bed, and this is a real turn on for me." The second says, "My husband is a musician, and when we make love it's as if he were playing me. He al- ways knows exactly what I want and gives it to me without my asking." The third says, "Well, my husband is a sales representative for IBM. When we make love all he does is sit on the edge of the bed and tell me how good it's going to be when I finally get it."

    (http://www.holysmoke.org/wb/wb0213.htm)

    --
    Curtains for windows?