“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.
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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