Is this spotlight?

talksense101talksense101
Posted:
in General Discussion edited January 2014
http://www.informationweek.com/story...01574&tid=5979



Microsoft's new sidebar based search promises to do what Spotlight is supposed to do. Is it the same functionality?

Comments

  • Reply 1 of 6
    mac the forkmac the fork Posts: 722member
    I'd like to comment on it, but I can't get it to work. The software claims to index, but finishes in an impossibly small period of time, and is incapable of finding anything. No error messages; it just doesn't work.



    I'm not sure if this is directly intended to upstage Spotlight anyway. It seems more like an uninspired effort to recover customers from Google. My guess is that Microsoft just couldn't come up with anything better.
  • Reply 2 of 6
    gene cleangene clean Posts: 3,481member
    Microsoft sees Google as a rival, hence the MSN search desktop thingy. Google did the same thing, so now MSN is doing it.



    I hate to say it, but for Microsoft, Apple is not a growing threat anymore. Google is the threat they're facing, and with Google's endorsement of FireFox it has become a serious player.



    So, to put it short, it's not Spotlight.
  • Reply 3 of 6
    talksense101talksense101 Posts: 1,738member
    If anyone can get this to work for them, please verify the claim below.



    Quote:

    Yusuf also touted his desktop search's file type reach. "We're indexing the broadest set of content of anyone in the [desktop search] business," We're indexing all of e-mail, all of your calendars, contacts, and notes, PDF files, which is a first, as well as GIF and bitmaps."



    Looks like M$ is talking trash again.
  • Reply 4 of 6
    mcqmcq Posts: 1,543member
    Quote:

    Originally posted by talksense101

    If anyone can get this to work for them, please verify the claim below.







    Looks like M$ is talking trash again.



    Well, I won't download/install it to verify (I'm pretty confident it can do all of them), but the first to PDF indexing is BS. Copernic has it in their utility:



    http://www.copernic.com/en/products/...rch/index.html



    One thing I don't see these doing AFAIK is allowing developers to write their own importers for their files. Each company that's making a search tool for Windows is dealing with their own extraction of information from the files.
  • Reply 5 of 6
    kickahakickaha Posts: 8,760member
    Bingo.



    And here we have the prime difference between MS and Apple: MS produces a technology, you use it as is. Developers can't easily extend it, or add functionality, because MS Knows Best. (VisualBasic is about their only way of doing this sort of thing - not quite the same.)



    Apple produces a technology, and opens it up to the world for extension, even if the core source code is sometimes closed. Spotlight, for instance. WebKit (which OmniWeb also uses). QuickTime. They make cool widgets for developers, then say "Go to it. Use them. Show us what you can do." Heck, CoreData is stunning in that regard.
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