A Dim View of Spotlight
Rob Griffiths (via Pierre Igot):
Once Tiger hit the streets, however, I was less than impressed with the real-world usability of Spotlight, as I discussed in this entry on my personal blog. When I wrote that entry back in May, I focused a fair bit on the interface and the performance. Now that I’ve had several months to adjust to using Spotlight, I’m ready to follow-up with some additional observations gained over the last six months, and some recommendations on what I’d love to see in “version 2.0” of Spotlight. But before that, let’s revisit a few of my first impressions of Tiger’s search technology.
I like the idea of Spotlight, but I’ve turned it off. Trying to search with it would lock up the Finder or the Spotlight menu for minutes at a time, and it would rarely find what I was looking for, anyway. I’ve seen it work well on Macs with a small number of files, but on my main Mac (a dual 2 GHz G5 with 2.5 GB of RAM but lots of files) it’s worse than useless because it slows everything down. Fortunately, Path Finder has a good file search feature.
