Microsoft steals the spotlight!

Tuesday May 17, 2005 at 12:49 am | Filed under Mac, Software

Windows Desktop Search was released today. It’s an indexing tool that monitors the files on your hard drive, the emails in your email program, PDFs, web pages, and all sorts of other things you may need to find. Because the app pre-indexes all of your things and builds a reference database of it all, you can quickly search for somethign on your computer that previous took forever, grinding through your drives to find. This is great stuff, you should download it.

Or wait. Maybe this isn’t so revolutionary? Maybe Yahoo and Google released this kinda thing months ago? Yup, they did. The release of Windows Desktop Search is a result of Microsoft “laboring to catch up in Web search” as ZDNet put it. That’s not totally fair to Microsoft though. They have created a more robust app than its Yahoo or Google counterparts. It even integrates a bit more into the operating system, and contains a few more bells and whistles.

Where it gets interesting is when you start to factor in what Apple has done. They announced that “Spotlight,” an indexing search function would be built into their Tiger OS 10.4, back in June of 2004. Last month Tiger was released and Spotlight is a dream. It’s not only integrated into the operating system seamlessly, but the cool thing about it is you don’t have to think about it. You get that same instant quality searches no matter how you search, and no matter what you search in, even 3rd party apps can take advantage of the Spotlight technology built into the OS.

I can go on about Tiger, but I’ll save some of that for another post, as Dashboard alone is one of the coolest things ever built into an OS. I just thought it was interesting how once a good idea is thrown out there, everyone jumps on the bandwagon, fast. While I think that Spotlight is easily the best implementation of the index searching lot, anyone who hasn’t downloaded an app like this should pick one and try it. Finding things on your computer has never been so easy.

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6 Responses to “Microsoft steals the spotlight!”

  1. Arlen Says:
    May 17th, 2005 at 11:16 am

    One gripe about Spotlight: it can’t find medial strings–only initial strings. So if I have a file called sofaulove.doc, typing “ofaulove” won’t find it. CHEESY.

    Dashboard IS cool, but on my G3 700mHz, it runs like a dead dog. I swear–I hit F12 and it’s a good 30 seconds before the widgets are all active. So I don’t use them much.

    If you know of any good Spotlight training sites, do tell. I mean, it is super-easy to use, but I suspect there are search delimiters you can type into the command line to narrow your results. Yes, I have read the Help file . . .

  2. Joe Says:
    May 17th, 2005 at 12:09 pm

    hmm.. That’s interesting, I haven’t had that problem, and I’ll have to try it when I get home. But I did jsut try that same experiement on the Windows Desktop Search on my work laptop and it did as you suggested. Maybe that’s the nature of indexing searches? Looks like an enhancement is needed.

  3. Joe Says:
    May 17th, 2005 at 12:28 pm

    On dashboard… yeah, the dashboard app itself takes very little memory, it’s the widgets that take up the resources. And when you first call up a dashboard full of widgets all of the data in them needs to load from the various sources, but subsequent call-ups of the dashboard should be a lot faster. It takes some time to get them all up when you have a lot of them. I can’t imagine what it’s like on a G3. If you haven’t maxed out the memory in that thing, I’d do that when you can.

  4. Joe Says:
    May 17th, 2005 at 12:47 pm

    A, there’s a thread here that answers your questions… it’s possible to search partial words in spotlight. There’s a couple of different ways to do it.

  5. Arlen Says:
    May 17th, 2005 at 5:14 pm

    Yes, Dashboard does show up a lot faster on subsequent launches. But I haven’t found much occasion to use it, just yet. One really cool thing, though, is that it has a whole offline dictionary. Very useful when you don’t want the ridiculously selective definitions offered by the MS Word dictionary.

    That thread looks good–answers a lot of questions. And confirms that a lot of functionality is missing from the quick toolbar (though it’s present in the more laborious “Find” function).

  6. Jason Says:
    May 18th, 2005 at 2:18 pm

    When I read something like “It even integrates a bit more into the operating system”. I can’t help but think “Great, so when Desktop Search goes down, it takes the kernel with it.”
    Feh, 2000 and XP have actually been pretty well rock solid for me. I just like to complain. I guess I picked up that stupid attitude ever since I started dual booting with Linux. (lotta good it does me. Wine schmine. It ain’t compatible with jack shiznit. Just kinda fun to mess with.)

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