[MW Forums]

Senior Editor Rob Griffiths has spent the past six months putting Spotlight to the test. And he's not a fan of the built-in search technology in OS X 10.4. In this analysis of Tiger’s marquee feature, Rob outlines Spotlight’s flaws and, more important, how Apple should fix them. more

[sdf]

Was this written a while ago? Because I used to have the same complaint as you for the immediate searching, but I've found 10.4.3 has fixed all of my issues issues there.

[switchtoamac]

Overall, a nice analysis of Spotlight's pros and cons. I would like to state that Tiger is the first version of OS X that supports Spotlight. I expect many improvements and customization options to appear in the next version of Spotlight that ships with OS X Leopard.

[karotto1]

I fully agree with the article. It is OUTRAGEOUS that Apple basically removed a resonable search capability from the Mac. Searching for a file by name is what I do 1 out of 20 times. And Spotlight does not even find many files I know exist. I am using the old sherlock in classic mode to find my stuff. Shame on Apple for this flawed piece of software

[onemilehigh]

A very good article. I've been using Macs since the beginning and I now own a Mac consulting company.
I consider SPOTLIGHT so bad that I have turned it off with the "Spotless" utility and I am using the "EasyFind" utility to find files. Spotlight does some good things but it also makes it much harder to do simple finds (which, as the author says), is what most people do most of the time.
My other big complaint is, it eats up too much processing power, always indexing my 500+ GB of hard drive space. On a smaller drive this might not be as big of a problem. I understand that even if you make some folders "Private" they continue to get indexed, but don't show results in a search. The performance hit to me is not worth the new functionality.
Scott

[Netizen_Kane]

Heartily agreed. I can count how many times I used Spotlight in the past year on the fingers of one hand. I've long since switched over to EasyFind to give me the simple "find by name" functionality I use 99.9% of the time.
Scott, it's not true that private folders continue to be indexed. I set some of my busier partitions to private because indexing them took forever and drive activity dropped to normal.

[melgross]

I stopped using it a few weeks after I installed 10.4. I've tried it again after each point release, but not much has changed.
What I find to be annoying is when searching for a file in a folder, often the search just continues, never ending. I have to back out to the list and find it manually.

[jedi228]

I'm jumping on the "I hate spotlight" bandwagon for all the reasons already articulated.
/forums/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/laugh.gifI will give Apple kudos for one thing--I am glad Apple is willing to take risks and is trying new things rather than sitting on their butts for years with the same software. I love the kind of company that kills off the iPodMini in order to replace it with the Nano.
Now, that being said, please fix spotlight! Nice effort, but it didn't work.

[TheTSArt]

To me, it's funny, Spotlight was supposed to change the way we think about saving files, not worrying so much about hierarchy, etc.
Well, it certainly changed the way I save files... I'm even more careful now about organization, since I can no longer rely on being able to Find anything on my Mac anymore. Even worse than files, to me, is how Spotlight is unable to even do basic searches in Mail. Just the basics of trying to find all emails sent by one particular address is nearly impossible.
I have tried third-party find apps, but I've found they take much longer to run than it is just to dig around and find them myself.

[bastion]

In reply to:

---

My other big complaint is, it eats up too much processing power, always indexing my 500+ GB of hard drive space.

---

Spotlight shouldn't be doing anything described as "always indexing." It should do the exhaustive index once and then reindex any single file as changed versions are saved. If you're seeing other behavior, something local is wrong.
My biggest gripe abut Spotlight comes from a programming perspective. As currently implemented, only a single importer plugin gets a shot at any given file. There's no way someone can say: "Hey, I know some additional extractable information from this file that's important to me." and just write a plugin that piggybacks on the standard importer. Ran into that the week 10.4 was released because I wanted to provide a way for users to define (and then search for) arbitrary named attributes on files.

[drm0223]

I too believe Spotlight needs a lot of work to become useful for me. Searching by file name tops the list. Searching anywhere is second. On my dual G5 2 MHz, I experience the following when trying to remove volumes from inclusion using the Privacy tab on the Preferences. Whether I drag certain drives or click the '+', they are NOT added to the Privacy/exclusion window. I can issue the mdutil command in terminal and cause the drive to be 'not indexed, yet it does not appear in the Preferences Privacy display. I have NO IDEA what is being indexed or how to be sure a volume has been excluded.
Very frustrating. We all paid a lot for Tiger. I've been very disappointed with Spotlight and Dashboard (which I NEVER use).

[jmincey]

This article should be distributed to the Apple Spotlight development team as their main agenda for the Leopard release.
The only thing I would add to Rob's list is better provision for searching network volumes -- including non-AFP volumes.

[uchuugaka]

funny, I know lots of folks who love spotlight.
myself included.
the find as you type feature gets going a little too quickly, I mean come on, 1 letter isn't enough to search anything...
but overall, I find myself using it to find things and it does.
the more stuff you have on a disk or partition, the more trouble you will have.
that's natural.
the best place to use spotlight is in a finder window.
it offers more options to narrow it down, like when you know it's in a particular volume, or folder/directory...
it's a search utility though, not a mind reader + miracle performer

[Deckard]

I completely agree with this, especially the removal of the simple Find that used to exist. The tip for getting it back is great, but we shouldn't have to go through those steps at all. Apple really bit it on this one, the interface in Spotlight and the default search is horrible. Did monkeys design this?
Apple needs to fix Spotlight right away, it's a shame that such a widely touted feature of OS X Tiger is so poorly implemented.