Slashdot Mirror
Tiger Spotlight Less Then Optimal
Anonymous Coward writes "Spotlight turns out to be a major pain for many users because it can't be turned off and insists on indexing volumes each time they are mounted.
Additionally, Spotlight doesn't come with a manual to teach you how to create complex queries. Most simple available queries --style popup menu selection-- are not powerful enough to be really useful.
A tutorial on http://www.scribent.com/ will explain how you can optimize Spotlight's behaviour and get the most of it, but all in all it seems like Apple has been overhyping in the extremes."
I find it to be very fast, and haven't encountered some of the problems that others claim is crippling them.
Of course, I wouldn't mind that manual on creating advanced queries...
So all the article says is that the Silver Bullet or Holy Grail of Searching didn't turn out to be something one could create simply by telling the programmers to do it?
Apple (and MS for that matter) try to create a system where you don't have to keep any order on your computer and find anything you want instantly. I am sure I am not the only one with a gut-feeling that this is closer to the area of unsolvable problems, right with "Making Software Idiotproof" and "Creating the perfect user-interface everyone can use without any prior computer experience" and "Creating a 100% secure computer on the internet",...
Linux is not Windows
Silas
For what it is worth I haven't had most of the problems being described. I use spotlight every day and while advanced queries are nice (and a manual would be even nicer) simple queries are *far* from "not powerful enough to be really useful."
Sure, it has some issues (report them to apple as bugs when you find them, it is the only way they know about them), but it is fast and it Works For Me(TM).
Now if only someone would create a LaTeX mdimporter...
Integrate Keynote and LaTeX
I've had a lot of problems with Spotlight. When I have a large external hard drive (160GB divided into 3 partitions) attached, I will find at random times that the processes mds and LAServer will start eating all of my CPU. This occurs despite the fact that all of my drives, including the external, have already been completely indexed. I've tried re-indexing (sudo mdutil -E /Volumes/volname), I've tried disabling indexing alltogether ( sudo mdutil -i off /Volumes/volname). None of these solutions worked. The only thing that has kept my CPU usage normal is leaving my external drive disconnected, although I've found that that only decreases the frequency of these mds attacks, not prevents them entirely.
I've also been experiencing frustrations with slow file copying (especially with rsync) that I suspect to be Spotlight- or metadata-related.
All in all it's been a pretty frustrating upgrade (actually, clean install to be exact) for me. I hope these issues are addressed in 10.4.2 (yes, I've submitted bug reports).
That being said, I'm not saying *someone* will find it useful, but really, it just looks like an attempt to move Firefox's "Find in page" functionality to the OS level.
I haven't noted any major performance hits either, and my current use of Tiger has been limited to a 1GHz Powerbooks, which usually gets a LaCie FireWire drive hooked up to it.
In fact, the only problem I've had with Tiger is that the UT2004 demo doesn't run under it (it's a work machine and I don't have an Apple at home, so I can't justify running out and buying the actual game, which has an update out that supposedly resolves the issue).
I talk about stuff.
I think it will take time before users really get effective use out of spotlight. It takes time to get used to the concept of using the search box in the upper right in file dialogs, the file manager, etc. instead of drilling down through directories manually. Spotlight also doesn't remove the need to have things reasonably categorized in directories, but it makes things far easier to find in such well patterned layouts.
It doesn't replace directories, it just makes things easier to find in them. Once people get used to finding files in subdirectories via spotlight searches instead of drilling down, spotlight is vastly more useful.
This sounds like an opportunity for someone to fill in the gaps that Apple left, the way Codetek Virtual Desktop or Unsanity Shapeshifter have. The Spotlight configuration files are relatively simple, so it doesn't sound like it would be difficult to produce a "Spotlight Enhancer".
Here's a link for anyone wondering what the Tiger Spotlight is. (In short: With Spotlight, you can find anything on your computer as quickly as you type. Search your entire system from one place: Files, emails, contacts, images, calendars and applications appear instantly.)
(By the way, here's a direct link to the article in question.)
Anyway, call me oldfashioned but an Anonymous Coward writing "Spotlight turns out to be a major pain for many users" is hardly the end of the world. Innovative interfaces may be "major pain" for an AC on Slashdot but meanwhile a lot of people in the Real World find it very useful (pun not intended), all the "overhyping in the extremes" (or even overhyping to the max) notwithstanding. Don't like it? Don't use it! Simple as that. Fortunately, as always with Apple, there's more than one way to do it. Do you think that Microsoft's SQL filesystem works better? Use Longhorn then.
Karma: Positive (probably because of superiour intellect)
If you make /etc/hostconfig contain
SPOTLIGHT=-NO-
you won't see spotlight again the next time you boot your workstation.
System Preferences > Spotlight > Privacy > + > (Choose your hard drives)
Not exactly 'turning it off' but it does stop it indexing and therefore chewing system performance.
...out of tha normally unsourcable. Bravo!
Yeah, the AMD64 vs the G4, that's a remotely close comparison. Stupid penquin fucking idiot.
Not difficult to use, unless you're a retard.
"...not powerful enough to be really useful."
If you've got a brain in your head, this isn't the case.
I updated to Tiger and Spotlight didn't stop indexing. I mean, after an hour, it said "ok I'm done now", but then one started typing in a query and it restarted with indexing, forgetting your query.
:-( And if you clicked on "results in a separate window", it started to search again, taking another 20-30 seconds. The separate window allowed to limit results, like "only from last week". I clicked it - and lo and behold, it took another 30 seconds to just limit the result. Of course I downgraded to 10.3 again.
:-(
Then after a few more hours, it sometimes didn't immediately started re-indexing, so results apeared. But they took 30 seconds to appear
Just my 2 cents
cant you just drag the hard drive into the exceptions list and it will permanently stop the indexing ?
I've used Spotlight to help me organize my GROWING documents folder. Each and every document I've created since owning my first Macintosh SE in 1989 is in there. It's a mess. I started pulling the low-hanging fruit out first: Invoices and Taxes. Spotlight has been a GREAT help.
Once O'Reily comes out with Spotlight:The Definitive Guide, Spotlight:The Missing Manual, or Spotlight in a Nutshell I will make more effective use of it.
--Mike
Shouldn't the "then" in the title be replaced with "than?"
I wonder what the expectations were for anyone that is disappointed by Spotlight.
... you get the idea. Sure if you haven't been using keywords until now you have your work cut out for you (although KA again comes to the rescue with a nice interface for adding new keywords). But if you have, then Spotlight is incredibly and totally awesome! Those searches bring up the standard spotlight results page, I can browse the returned pictures and even run a nice slideshow: all without even launching iPhoto!
I started off my Tiger use by messing around with Spotlight. "Wow, all the emails I ever sent to [name]!" "Cool, any word document that has [project] in title!" etc.
Then I thought about some of the complex and hard to maintain folder hierarchies I have. The folder system made it generally easy to find my files, but only if I was using them in a manner that I had expected when I started the organization. Spotlight could be the answer, I thought.
So I took a non-critical directory nest and used my existing folder system and Automator to quickly add spotlight comments to the files. (Select all files in [proj_A directory], add [proj_A] comment to files.)
Now I could hit command-space and type in a key phrase or two and get all the files in a nice menu. Clicking on "show all" brings up a nice, and constantly updated finder window for the search. Ah, now we're getting somewhere.
So I created some smart folders based on current criteria (and a few theoretical cases). Woo! Now I have a dynamic directory structure! Add a few custom Automator plug-ins (so I can right click files and do expected actions like "Move file to [dir] and add comment [helpful metadata]".)
Smart folders (driven by Spotlight) in email is pretty handy also. A couple weeks ago my wife and I were having our yard landscaped. This, naturally, involved a lot of emails back and forth with the landscapers over plant choice, guidelines, schedules, etc. So rather than setup a rule and folder for something temporary; I right clicked on the landscaper's email address and clicked "Create a smart folder". Ta da! Now I don't even have to care where the email goes, any email from the landscapers is all grouped together. When the work was finished, I deleted the smart mailbox and the clutter was gone. I still have their emails in my general sub-inbox should I have to refer to something. All emails and advice are still just a quick spotlight search away. For example: "water magnolia" to find the watering advice for our new tree.
And then there's iPhoto. With the help of the excellent iPhoto Keyword Assistant I have been diligently adding metadata to all of my digital photos. While KA fixes one of iPhoto's big shortcomings (an awful interface to the keywords, especially if you have a lot); using the keywords was still clunky. You have to start iPhoto, open up a special sub-window and then click on the keywords you want. This interface is barely acceptable when you only have a dozen keywords; when you have five dozen it is quickly painful.
Spotlight fixes this. It includes searching by iPhoto keyword!* So I can start up a spotlight seach, type "obx sunset" to see all the sunset pictures I've taken at the Outer Banks. Or "munich" for all the pictures of Munich, or "munich cathedrals"
* There have been reports of problems with this working for some people, and I was one of them. It seems that when spotlight finishes it major index, it still has some indexing tasks left in the background and iPhoto keywords are one of those. I noticed that a spotlight keyword search only worked partially at first. Any photos I had recently worked on or added were in, and sporadic other photos as well. So I created a keyword called "temp" and added it to every photo, then deleted it. After that all of my photos were indexed.
Spotlight has even changed how I launch applications. I used to have a dock chock full of any applications I might launch.
So your hint is kinda useless, sorry. I want to turn off 1 feature, not stuff that still worked in OS X 10.3 :-(
Simple queries can be very powerful.
I can type Truth is a three edge sword
and all my Bablyon 5 quote files are brought up.
Use Spotlight like you use google. The advance searches help, but not always needed.
i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
No problems with it either, until I tried the tips given in this very tutorial. Not only didn't they work, but Spotlight stopped working, and I had to re-index the drive ! I'll continue using it like I always have done, and where it shines : simple searches. And like you I'll wait for some good book about it.
I just made a duplicate of the file "Building My PC.doc" and renamed the copy to "BuildingMyPC.doc". When I went to Spotlight to search for it, my last search for "PC" turned this file up without me having to type anything in at all!
I bet you have the word "PC" somewhere in the text of that file.
-- Boycott Shell
Macintouch has a report with a lot more info.
Possibly the results depend on how people upgrade? What upgrade options did you use?
There have been numerous discussions on slashdot on crafting complex queries. The syntax is descibed in the command line too. I find spolight works great. think the story belongs on winsupersite as it's just some idiot spin.
it's "less than," not "less then."
(%i1) factor(777353);
(%o1) 777353
According to the very page you linked, this hint "does kill searching in Mail.app", so you fix A and break B, so it's kinda, you know, like, a no-hint. :-(
And last time I checked, /. didn't come up with Apple's slogan.
(%i1) factor(777353);
(%o1) 777353
It's poorly documented, but Spotlight is actually more versatile than it looks.
Indexing takes a long time at first of course, but once it has done all files once, further indexing is incremental. When a file is created, written, moved or deleted, it is indexed at that time. So that happens only one or two files at a time and has little impact. When a volume is mounted though, it has to do some looking to see what changed, and it might have to index a lot of files if there have been a lot of changes.
To not index a volume you can list it under the privacy tab in System Preferences. Or if you know you never care what is in a pile of files of a particular kind, such as music files, you can turn off that type of files in the Preferences as well.
In searches, you can use AND, OR, NOT, LITERAL, and parenthesis to make some pretty decent search strings. But you don't use those words, you do it like this: A space means AND. The "|" means OR. A "-" prefix means NOT. And putting a phrase in quotes finds it literally.
So "this that" means find files with both "this" and "that" while "this|that" mean find this _or_ that. Using "-this" finds files that do not have "this" in them. Putting a phrase in quotes means find the exact phrase. And parens are for grouping as usual.
And if you are a geek, congratulations! You can check spotlight programming docs and use a raw query string. For this, you have to use the Finder "Find..." command. In the "Kind" popup menu, choose "Other..." and a list of a whole ton of cool attributes appears. In there is "Raw Query" and you can use the raw search "language". For examples of raw query strings, make a Smart Folder with any query. Then do Get Info on the Smart Folder itself (folders are in ~/Library/Saved Searches) and you'll see the raw query.
Have fun! - Lepton
I think what the submitter means is "less THAN optimal."
Here. Though it looks like it justs modifies the /etc/hostconfig file, if that's all it takes(?)
Caveat emptor. I don't use Mail.app, so I'm not affected by that; I'm sorry to hear that there's not a good solution for you.
That beige G3 233 MHz is now ready for YellowDog, forwarding mail.
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
But then the slogan is missing quotation marks. When I read it, I think "stupid" and you can find many grammarians who agree, regardless of Apple's protestation so it doesn't convey the message Apple intended.
As to the origin of the slogan, this is apple.slashdot.org, hence my reference was to fans of Apple. I.e., people who think different instead of "different" are also likely to use "then" instead of "than".
But, like you, I'm on a dual G5. Am running a striped RAID array and an external USB drive.
Beats Find.
This is my post. There are many others like it. If you don't like what you read here, go try one of the others.
if apple had been trumpeting "UNIX SYSADMINS: NEVER USE GREP AGAIN!" then they would have been over-hyping in the extreme. as it is, spotlight is the best answer we currently have to "i saved my thingie and now i can't find it!" syndrome. it has its flaws, and some will be ironed out. what's the big deal? besides, it is possible to turn it off - google for turn spotlight off. done.
I've always considered desktop search to be dead on arrival. One of the first thing I figured out how to do on XP was to disable the indexing service. I've tried the Google and Copernic desktop searches and ended up removing both. It's fun for about 10 minutes, but you don't want a lot of indexing going on in the background when you already know where everything is.
Perscriptive grammar is for panzies.
There is no error with apples slogan. It is instructing you in what to think about their product. As in, "Think that our product IS different." Not think differently about our product, but that our product is different from the rest of computers.
On a side note though, then and than are completely different words and are misused only due to their phoenetic similarities. Like "you're" and "your." This is not necessarily a good thing. Although, if you can distinguish them in verbal communication, maybe it's not such a big deal when the word is spelled incorrectly?
I have no problems with it either, and this is on a 600mhz G3, a wimpy computer by any of today's standards.
I don't know what's up with these guys... maybe they have a million little files on their computer.
Help I'm a rock.
If you use TextEdit to create your LaTex files, then you could use Spotlight to search them.
If a writer wants a person to think of something (e.g., "Think 'snow'.") the word for the thing to be thought of is put into quotation marks.
Ouch... but my keyboard isn't (sorry for the aborted post, here's what I meant to write:)
Get a real Mac.
I have a real Mac (dual 2 Ghz G5 with 2 GB RAM), and Spotlight still is slow!
I used to use the old search in finder and it was much faster (after you indexed your directories).
I'll type in what I'm looking for and it will beach-ball in the middle of my typing and not let me type the whole thing in. And I always get tons of false positives for stuff that should be unique (e.g. man_cims).
Spotlight is really starting to get on my nerves...
There are 10 types of people in this world, those who can count in binary and those who can't.
Quotation marks have multiple connotations that your "post" fails to take into account. Especially in the context of advertising copy. I "suspect" you are quite aware of this and just "enjoy" "playing" the roll of "'anal' grammar" troll on slashdot.
It's actually "Understanding is a three edged sword".
Just FYI. I wouldn't want you to not be able to find your B5 quote files, after all.
Yes, there are women on Slashdot. Deal with it.
I have always found Mac's searching capabilities a little weak. I'm very sloppy about tracking my time to bill appropriately as a graphic artist. So when monthly report time rolls around, I simply do a time-based search for every Visible Document Not in System Folder or Library, Whose filename Includes neither Cache nor Prefs, which was Modified this(or last) Month.
An earlier version of Sherlock worked for me for that for awhile, but in an upgrade I lost the capability to drag&drop the found file list into Excel.
I now use File Buddy to do my monthly search, and export the found list as tab-delimited txt to import into Excel, where I can leisurely review how long I spent on each file. Not perfect, but I can generate a reasonably accurate report, after the fact, with documentation to back it up.
And you, madam, are very ugly. In the morning, I shall be sober.
Not exactly 'turning it off' but it does stop it indexing and therefore chewing system performance. You can't do this on folders you don't have write permission to- and on your main system drive, -you- shouldn't.
Please help metamoderate.
Really, I want to know, because I know Apple didn't give you this impression. I know that I didn't (and I wrote a ton of rants about how cool Spotlight would be), and I've never seen such an amazingly aggressive outlook on it. So where?
This is not a bug. All you need is an importer. Let me tell you what would happen if Spotlight indexed every file as plain text, or even gave you the option to do so. I can do so with one word:
Chaos.
Without the context of what a file is and what data about is is worthwhile to a content search, it's a madhouse. Imagine if it searched .html files without knowing anything about them. You enter in one > or < and you get the entire set of html files on your disk. This is alsmost assuredly not what you asked for.
Spotlight is not meant to be a replacement to UNIX's grep. Spotlight does content-searching, which is a significantly more difficult beast to slay. So, it ignores things it doesn't understand by design.
And all someone needs to do is write an importer for you, and blam, you're good. But that importer is where the human direction on what "content" is for a shell script, and what kind of type it should be interpreted as.
You may not realize you want it this way, but I assure you that you do, and you'd be far more upset if it was done the way you pine for above.
This complaint is valid, although dripping with melodrama. Please give Apple a revision or two to work this out. It's a much harder problem than you realize, and has some unqiue considerations at the edge cases (what kind of mounted drive is "too small" to index? Should machines share indexes? How do you secure this service?)
Apple wants this to happen, I'm sure of it. It'll be here soon enough. Don't expect it to work with windows drives, though.
Slashdot. It's Not For Common Sense
I'll try not to veer off topic too much, but I think this is relevant given the "hype" reference.
:-)
We live in a world that is advertised much differently than it really is. We're all familiar with Steve Jobs' "reality distortion field," but I think he's just a player in a bigger game.
Everything in our culture tends to be on maximum "hype" drive. It's gotten to the point where we are suffering from a cynical consumer ennui.
Why?
I think it's because we've been over-loaded with hype and we're not buying the bull anymore and/or we are angry that products don't live up their hype.
Perhaps we're subconsciously searching for something right and perfect in a world that seems to be eroding into chaos and disorder. We are succumbing to a cynical and unfulfilled world of disillusionment as we realize that we're nothing but a market demographic to the shysters that are hyping up the things they want us to buy at inflated prices.
That or the products just suck. You choose.
I might know what I'm talkin' about, but then again, this is Slashdot...
I find Spotlight useful as a sort of primitive command line. Use Cmd-Space, then enter the name of an application (e.g. "Firefox"), and the app is right there in the menu for you to click on. This is nice, since the traditional methods for launching apps suck (digging through the Applications folder is slow; putting everything in the dock adds clutter).
Unfortunately, it seems that the search path is limited, and I haven't figured out a way to change it. For example, typing "Kerberos" in the search box fails to locate the ticket manager, which is in /Library/CoreServices. You would think that with all this fancy technology, Spotlight would be able to do everything that the Unix "locate" command can handle, but apparently that is not the case. So, if anyone from Apple is watching this thread, I'd like to offer that as a request for enhancement!
CTRL-Space, type a few letters of the app name, hit enter. Fastest way to launch apps, access bookmarks, do google and dictionary searches.... it's incredible. Very nearly what you're doing now, but smoothed.
Quicksilver
Check it out yo:
0 503165951266
http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=2005
Mod parent up, he's Steve Jobs.
Spotlight turns out to be a major pain for many users because it can't be turned off and insists on indexing volumes each time they are mounted.
Just how did this AC arrive that the "many users" thing? Was there a poll among all Tiger users? How about "some" or "a couple" or "a few" or "one or two guys I just happened to know" instead? Sort of changes the whole story, right? This sort of thing is one of the reasons why people are turning away from the tradition media: They are sick and tired of everything being hyped. Please, just the facts, OK?
For the record: I use Spotlight on my aging iBook G4 800 MHz and don't see any speed problems. If anything, Tiger is a lot faster than Panther was (and my hardware doesn't even support those nifty Core whatever features). If you are that much into speed tuning, I suggest looking into Gentoo.
Please correct the title (Less Than). The error stands out like a, like a, like one of those people complaining about spelling errors all the time. Sorry. Couldn't help it. Please forgive me.
... but one BIG gripe I have about 10.4 is that Finder builds a preview icon of all of my (massive allotment of ) photoshop (5-5.5) files its own damned self, rather than referencing and displaying the actual document icon. I'd be fine with this if it cached the icon, but it doesn't. :P Waiting ten seconds for finder to build a preview when there was already a perfectly good one to work with is extremely counterproductive.
Has nobody heard of Butler, for heavens' sake?!
p rache=english&kopf=labor
Butler: [key combo of your choice] + [first few letters of the app you're after] = app launches.
I find it hard to believe that anybody would be running OS X and -not- have Butler installed. It's even free (although anyone who doesn't donate $18 deserves a week locked in a church with nothing but mormons for company).
http://www.petermaurer.de/nasi.php?thema=butler&s
What's *wrong* with you people?...
Apple:
1. Make it
2. Make it work
3. Make it secure
4. Make it easy
5. Release it
6. Make it faster
Microsoft:
1. Make it
2. Make it faster
3. Release it
4. Make it easy
5. Make it work
6. Make it secure
"Content indexing is currently four to five times faster than the one of Panther, not limited to the first 100 KB of the documents, not case insensitive, does include all words and all numbers . . . DEVONthink is able to preview found documents (including highlighting of occurrences)."
Never mind that DT also shows you related items - love that AI - surfs the web, clips, composes, views images, does the dishes and turns out the lights.
Are you thinking Mac OS X uber-app? I am. I run my computer and my life thru DevonTech, including writing to web and for print.
With Launchbar (or Quicksilver) and any Devon app, you don' need no steekin' Spotlight.
My 10.2 iBook sometimes gets slowed down by something screwing with permissions in the input method or auto-spell-checking stuff. One thing that may help is using the disk utility on the CD to repair permissions.
If you don't know where that is, Boot the install CD, look immediately in the install menu before you click any other buttons. The disk repair menu has two options, you should recognize which repairs permissions if you know that it's there.
Caveat -- the database has been known to get screwed up, leaving you having to go get on the apple support boards and hunt for the name of a file that you have to change by hand.
So the best thing is to get on the apple support boards and look for clues on slow spotlight first.
And then there's iPhoto. With the help of the excellent iPhoto Keyword Assistant I have been diligently adding metadata to all of my digital photos. While KA fixes one of iPhoto's big shortcomings (an awful interface to the keywords, especially if you have a lot); using the keywords was still clunky. You have to start iPhoto, open up a special sub-window and then click on the keywords you want. This interface is barely acceptable when you only have a dozen keywords; when you have five dozen it is quickly painful.
iPhoto 5 has a much less 'sucky' keyword interface. After a tiny bit of getting used to it's really quite handy. It's a little less useful when you have you scroll the double column keyword pane, but still tons better than iPhoto 4 and older. I haven't used keyword assistant, so I can't compare it. You can also build boolean filters with just the keyword pane, so that's a nice addition. Finally, the search capabilities in iPhoto 5 are also way beyond 4.x. So that's just my two cents. iLife '05 is worth it just for the updates to iPhoto. If you use any of the other apps, then it's just gravy.
Read Heinlein's 1953 Revolt in 2100, now more than ever.
Of course I use iPhoto 5. I buy every iLife suite they day its release (iWork is totally awesome too). But nothing beats searching by keyword through spotlight, you don't even have to launch iPhoto. It's perfect for deomonstrating spotlight and os x to the uninitiated.
I've had Spotlight activate while typing into some forum forms... SUPER ANNOYING. I have tried to figure out how to turn it off. Suggestions welcomed. Thanks.