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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."
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?
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...
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.
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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.
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.
...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.
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.
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'man find'
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
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"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.
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.
Windows 95 brought us far more features than Macintosh 84.
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.
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!
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! :)
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.
"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!
No shit, Sherlock. :)
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BeOS , it had file metadata support years ago and worked well with it . .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
not to mention the other companys that have since been making products of this nature
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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
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.
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.)
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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.
This just in! Microsoft downplays competitor's achievement with a promise of better functionality in a vaporware product! Film at 11!
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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. . . .
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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.
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...
"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.
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!
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.
In Gaming News.
Duke Nukem Forever will be better than Half Life 2.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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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
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.
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... aaaannnd DELETE.
You're right, this is a useful feature!
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.
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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."
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Curtains for windows?