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Tiger Spotlight Less Then Optimal

Posted by Hemos on from the slower-then-molasses dept.

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."

9 of 126 comments (clear)

  1. Turn Spotlight off, then by Silas · · Score: 5, Informative
    There are numerous hints floating around on how to disable Spotlight. I did this on a slower Powerbook, and it worked, actually making Tiger feel as fast as I would have expected with a major OS upgrade. I *really* like Spotlight, but that hardware was suffering at its hands.

    Silas

  2. The Only Thing Extremely Overhyped Is The /. Piece by Llywelyn · · Score: 3, Informative

    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
  3. Can't turn it off? by skinfitz · · Score: 4, Informative

    System Preferences > Spotlight > Privacy > + > (Choose your hard drives)

    Not exactly 'turning it off' but it does stop it indexing and therefore chewing system performance.

  4. Re:Not That Bad by peragrin · · Score: 2, Informative

    I have got to agree. i just downloaded the www.neooffice.org spotlight plugin. It indexs all of my Open Office files.

    I can type in a sentence from one of those files and it pops right up. I often find myself knowing part of a quote but not the filename where the rest of the quote is located. I type it in. and there it is.

    Indexing took literally minutes on my powerbook, and just a few hundred open Office files.

    My biggest compaliant is that it looks like Apple took MSFT fisher price colour scheme for it.

    --
    i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
  5. more info by rakerman · · Score: 3, Informative

    Macintouch has a report with a lot more info.

  6. Re:Links please? by Paradise+Pete · · Score: 5, Informative
    In short: With Spotlight, you can find anything on your computer as quickly as you type.

    Well, I was about to reply to this saying it's bullshit, that spotlight is much slower than that. And of course I wanted some actual numbers to back me up. So I did a search. And I have to admit it really did find things as quickly as I could type it.

    This is a big change from when I first installed 10.4. I don't know if the indexing wasn't complete, or if they made a big improvement in 10.4.1, but now it's really, really useful. I tried several more searches and each was as fast.

  7. Re:Definitely not great here by mclaincausey · · Score: 3, Informative
    Err... you know you can disable Spotlight in specific folders, right?

    Under the Spotlight System Preference pane, click on the privacy pane and add your pr0n folder.

    --
    (%i1) factor(777353);
    (%o1) 777353
  8. Yeah, but it also kills searching inside Mail.app by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Informative

    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. :-(

  9. It's covertly versatile by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

    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