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Preview Of New Beagle Search UI

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on from the i-still-run-a-desktop-search-in-my-head dept.

An anonymous reader writes "The new Beagle Search UI was merged into Beagle CVS last week, after being developed as a separate module known as 'Holmes'. A preview is now online with plenty of screenshots. It currently doesn't look as smooth or well integrated as Spotlight, but it does look promising and it is still in a very early stage."

3 of 36 comments (clear)

  1. the spotlight interface is horrible by John+Nowak · · Score: 2, Informative

    Anything should be better. I'm not going to get into details here, but if anyone has actually used it, they'll know how limited and clunky it is. John Siracusa outlined the issues well in the Ars write-up on Tiger.

  2. Interesting... by mellon · · Score: 4, Informative

    I'm working on a somewhat more flexible search tool for Qt/KDE right now. I'll put up some screenshots in a few minutes - I'd be interested in some insightful comments about it.

    1. Re:Interesting... by mellon · · Score: 2, Informative

      Excessive reliance on indexing renders searching virtually useless. If you want to use searching to keep track of your files, you need to search quickly. Generally speaking, an indexed search will either find too many matches, or too few, because you can't do intelligent string matching with an indexed search - you can only search for indexed words, and of necessity the index can't store word relationships.

      For example, and index will have a pointer in it that says "acrobatic" occurs in files a, b, c, d, e and f. And the word "wombat" occurs in files c, e, k, l and m. So if you want to find the phrase "acrobatic wombat", which only occurs in file c, you're going to get either too long a list, or possibly no list at all.

      If the words you're searching for are rare, you can use an index to speed up the search by winnowing the list of files based on the search. However, if the words are common, chances are that most files will match, and so the time spent winnowing the file list via the index will not make any noticable difference in the search speed.

      My point is not that indexing is wrong, but that it can be (and almost always is) abused to produce results that aren't very helpful. Spotlight, for example, while very cool in the abstract, almost always fails to find what I need, or finds so many things that although the thing I needed was on the list, I didn't save time by using spotlight to find it.