“Spotlight is Apple’s new search utility, included in Mac OS X 10.4 ‘Tiger’ and designed to search for information stored on your computer. It searches file names, file contents and ‘metadata,’ and, through some clever slight of hand, also searches Apple’s ‘iApplication’ information, including iCal calendars, Address Book entries and iPhoto images. Spotlight does this very quickly but has some quirks and odd limitations and sometimes just fails to work properly,” Robert Mohns writes for MacInTouch.
“Spotlight works hand in hand with new metadata functionality built into Tiger. Whenever a file is written to disk, a special program is run that reads the file, adds metadata about it to the file system, and updates a special “index”. When you start typing in the system Spotlight menu, Spotlight searches this index,” Mohns writes.
“The Spotlight index is both its strength and weakness. The centralized location of the index means that Spotlight can search incredibly quickly. However, this database can be incomplete or corrupted, and some early adopters of Tiger have discovered that Spotlight can quietly cease giving complete results without any notice. There are some things that you can do, if this happens,” Mohns writes.
Mohns covers Spotilight in several sections:
Limitations
Problems and Tests
Fixes
Other Tips and Tricks
Looking Forward
Full article here.
Related MacDailyNews articles:
Manually organize dinosaur Windows PCs while Mac users already have the future with Spotlight – May 18, 2005
Microsoft employees claim Apple lifted ‘Spotlight’ idea straight out of early builds of Longhorn – May 16, 2005
CBS News: how envious Windows users can attempt to poorly simulate Mac OS X Tiger’s Spotlight – May 04, 2005
Apple.com debuts new Dashboard Widgets, Automator Actions, and Spotlight Plugins download sections – April 29, 2005
Thurrott: Apple copying Microsoft’s Longhorn search features with Mac OS X ‘Spotlight’ – December 15, 2004
Apple’s Mac OS X 10.4 ‘Tiger’ to contain powerful ‘Spotlight’ search technology – November 11, 2004
Apple Exec: Mac OS X Tiger’s ‘Spotlight’ system-wide search tech inspired by iTunes – July 02, 2004
hmmm
I have found that there are a couple files that it doesn’t find with one keyword, but will with another.
The worst part about that for me was it wasn’t finding the file when I typed in a word in the actual filename, but did find it by some other relevant content.
I’m sure that over time it will be tweaked and improved. It is still an incredible application with incredible implications for our future workflows.
As with a lot of other new features, I’m sure this will be tweaked and honed in subsequent 10.4.x revisions…
Apple has a habit of introducing software before it is ready. iPhoto was incredibly slow when first introduced. The new iLife has some weak spots. Safari had problems. OSX took a while. I am sure it will get there
a few of the “Limitations” like the iPhoto indexing have already been fixed
I can’t wait to love Spotlight.
I don’t now since it is buggy and clearly doesn’t find everything, which makes its value suspect.
Plus the use of quotes to find exact phrases is buggy and inconsistent.
But hopefully we’ll see the bug fixes to Spotlight soon–and the other hundred or so really visible problems in Tiger–and Tiger will finally be truly be usable.
Tiger is going to be awesome. But the big bad bugs need to go.
Apple has a habit of introducing software before it is ready. iPhoto was incredibly slow when first introduced. The new iLife has some weak spots. Safari had problems. OSX took a while. I am sure it will get there
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Well, I mean, you could say the same about pretty much any company out there. Why wait until it’s PERFECT to release it.
MS always takes about 3 versions to get things “right.”
Why would Apple sit on their hands, only to say “oh we had that technoloy, we just took our time to get it right..” while their customers jump ship
Point is, I wouldn’t have wanted them to wait on Safari, even if it took a ‘beta’ stage to work the bugs out..
I’ve found that Spotlight (and Mail) won’t identify the people I’ve redirected mail to. This seems a serious shortcoming, since I manage a large class list, and often need to see whether I’ve redirected mail to late registering students. Are there any solutions to this issue?
the smart folder idea is awesome. except for one thing.
i wish i could save a smart folder and then see the contents in colum view.
for example: make a folder that will find all movies. i would then like to be able for it to show me the movies in colum view. not have to double click the smart folder and have it show up in a spotlight window.
if they could impliment that one tweek is would truly revolutionize the way i organize files.
*sorry about the spelling, im on a windows machine at school using portable firefox off my Shuffle so i dont have system wide spell check*
“Apple’s Mac OS X Tiger’s Spotlight search covered to-death” —
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Personally, I think the present incarnation of Spotlight is a disaster. I’m swamped with irrelevant results whenever I search for ANYTHING!
Whoever invented this thing should have counted to ten before pronouncing it “ready for prime time.”
As much as I appreciate Tiger’s refinements, I’m seriously considering a reinstall of Panther to regain access to a search function I can actually use.
Sigh…
Can someone do me a huge favor that’s running Tiger? Look in System Preferences | Accounts | Login Items and tell me what the full path to SystemServices or Core something is. I removed it and it solved the CPU spike problems but it’s in effect disabled Spotlight. Wish to see if 10.4.1 update solved the problem. And yes I tried the turn on indexing and removed spotlight index and then let it reindex…that didn’t solved the CPU problem.