Mossberg: Apple’s Spotlight search technology ‘speedy,’ no need to periodically index files

21 years ago

“The Graphical User Interface has been a success in the mass market since the Apple Macintosh debuted in 1984, and it has dominated computing since Microsoft Windows went mainstream around 1990. Its visual display of files stored in a nested hierarchy of folders has worked pretty well — until recently,” Walter S. Mossberg writes for The Wall Street Journal.

“But now a wave of new desktop search tools is becoming available, some built right into new operating systems and others available as add-ons. Big names are getting in the game — Apple, Microsoft, Google and Yahoo. I’ve been testing the leading candidates and previewing some future contenders,” Mossberg writes.

“Spotlight… is the new universal, speedy search system built into Apple’s latest operating system for the Macintosh, called Tiger. Because it is an integral part of the operating system, which handles all files, Spotlight knows about all the key kinds of information stored on the computer… Because Spotlight is part of the operating system, it avoids one of the big flaws of add-on search systems — the need to periodically ‘index’ new files in batches, a process that spins the hard drive continuously, sometimes for hours.”

“Microsoft plans to emulate Spotlight in the next version of Windows, code-named Longhorn. But it’s way behind Apple. Longhorn won’t reach consumers until the fall of 2006 at the earliest,” Mossberg writes. Of Google’s Desktop Search, Mossberg writes, “familiar Google search results page, which works so well for the web, is very limiting for a desktop search. And the software offers only a crude way to sort the results and no way to preview content.” Of MSN’s desktop search, Mossberg writes, “by default, MSN’s search product searches only your email (which must be run by Microsoft products) and the My Documents folder. You have to tinker with settings to get it to search your whole computer, something all its competitors do by default. The limited search horizon cuts down on MSN’s indexing time and makes it look faster than it really is, but it will likely cause you to get only partial search results.”

Full article here.

MacDailyNews Note: Newsweek magazine calls Mr. Mossberg “the most powerful arbiter of consumer tastes in the computer world today.” Time magazine calls him “the most influential computer journalist.” And Rolling Stone calls him “the most powerful columnist in technology.” The Washington Post declared Mr. Mossberg “one of the most powerful men in the high-tech world” and “a one-man media empire whose prose can launch a new product.” And the New York Times calls him a “protean critic of the new economy’s tools and toys.” Mr. Mossberg was awarded the 1999 Loeb award for Commentary, the only technology writer to be so honored. For seven years in a row, 1995-2001, he was named as the most influential journalist writing about computers, in the annual ranking published by Technology Marketing magazine.