Well, now Yahoo! has its own version of the new desktop search feature that enables one to search their hard drive for files. I gotta ask, what was preventing people from searching and/or managing their files before? There seems to be a big interest with Google and Yahoo!, especially the advertising angle, and big money is being spent to make sure that you cannot find your files, without their search tools. I myself right-click on the drive or folder, and do a search for what I’m looking for. Do people not know how to do this, therefore requiring another corporate feature to be placed on their desktop to achieve this?
I should add that the tool isn’t yet available until possibly January. But still…
How is this any different from going Start>Search>For Files and Folders?
I know!
If it’s like the Google version, it pre-indexes your files so the search is lightning-quick.
I believe Windows does this as well, when your computer is idle, it does some kind of indexing.
I don’t believe Windows does any indexing, but even if it does the Google desktop search does a massively better job; its results are literally instantaneous. I’ve always had to wait using the Windows built-in search.
I think Windows does index, but only if you’ve formatted your drive to NTFS (most drives are still probably formatted FAT32). Also, I remember Windows saying it needed a large amount of disk space to index so I disabled it.
Even with the Windows indexing, the Windows file search is still dirt slow. Google’s is faster than a cheetah on crack. That said, I don’t use the Google search much, because I have all my files logically ordered, so I have no problem finding them.
It’s built in on the Mac and has been for at least half an eon. MacOS 8.6 or thereabouts at any rate.
The Unix underbelly has its own version so we’ve actually got two of them built in now.
I guess I just didn’t understand it, but if it works for y’all… go for it. I just wanna say that I have gigs and gigs of crap and searching has never been a problem for my 1800+ system. Not really slow at all. I guess for a slower system, it would be.
I’m guessing it’s cause 90% of people out there don’t know how to use the search function. If google or yahoo is able to use a faster more user friendly system, then let them go right on ahead.
Yeah. I was going to say that I can’t live without Sherlock, which you could use to search your hard drive (or things on the Internet) starting with—I think—OS 8.5 at least, and now in OS X can do so much more. I can’t live without my dictionary, translator, and . . . well, those I use the most often. Searching your hard drive has moved from Sherlock now, and is easier than ever.
/# find | grep *whatver*
Doesn’t that only work if you already know (even partially) the name of the file you’re searching for? I thought the selling point of the new desktop search tools was that you could search by file content rather than file name, which would allow you to find a document if you remember some of the text/keywords contained in it, but not the file name.
If indeed such a feature is included in the new desktop search tools, it would be especially useful for my sister, who rarely gives meaningful names to her documents, but instead just accepts whatever file name is suggested when she first saves the file. In Microsoft Word, I believe the suggested name is just the first line of the document, which for her school papers is usually her full name. Accepting the default suggested file name inevitably leads to a “My Documents” folder filled with files named {FULL NAME} (1).doc, {FULL NAME} (2).doc, …, ${FULL NAME} (N).doc, and this situation is hardly conducive to finding the desired file rapidly.
Some of you aren’t realizing the benefits of this type of thing. The value is to be able to find content in any of your documents and not just locate a file when you already know part of the name. Imagine that you have 500 Word documents and you know that a person’s address is in one of them but you have no idea which one. Being able to “google” your own computer is immensely powerful and this is only one of millions of examples. Having all the files on your hard drive makes these types of searches very fast.
I read an appropriate comment in a computer magazine a little while ago. It said that it is amazing that Google can locate any phrase among billions of web pages in less than a second yet it takes windows 20 minutes to find content on your own hard drive.
I think I get it.
We’ve had it for some time now.
And even before we could search on content, we had better local (“desktop”) built-in search engines than the native one that ships with Windows.
I gave it a test run for about a month, but it failed so I got rid of it.
If Macs have really had Google Desktop-style local search capability for years, why all the buzz about Spotlight, and about whether or not Google will bring out a Mac version of their Desktop Search thingy?
Good question.