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Google Desktop vs. Apple Spotlight
October 11, 2007

I am not a big fan of the Macintosh search engine called Spotlight and I am not alone. If you squirrel deep into the Apple support forums and search for Spotlight you find a lot of people complaining about a lot of things. For example, searching all the posts and views this year for “Spotlight” I discovered 917 views of the topic “Spotlight can't find anything!!”, 896 of “Spotlight finds nothing” 759 of “Spotlight is repeatedly re-indexing”, 491 of “Spotlight indexing problems”, 350 of “Spotlight not doing so well with .pdfs” And most of these topics conclude that “This question is not answered.”

So I was thrilled to read that Google has introduced a search application for the Macintosh called Google Desktop (http://desktop.google.com/en/mac/). I admit I have only been using it for about a week, but so far I am loving it.

It creates an index of your files like Spotlight does. So I installed it at the end of the day and let it run overnight. It is easy to launch simply requiring a quick tap – tap of the command key. Unlike Spotlight which seems to search forever (minutes) the initial search is much quicker (seconds).

Google fans will like the ability to use the same search criteria you use with Google, such as quotes for specific word strings or + and – marks to include or exclude search terms.

At the bottom of the search window is an option to search more on your computer or search the web. If you launch either option you start viewing the results in your web browser under the heading Google Desktop Beta. The file options along the top of the Google Desktop Beta window includes emails, web history, files, media and others.

One of the features I do not is the email and web history listings. The email list included content from old junk emails such as “75% off Regular price for VlAGRA!” and the cached web pages showing content from what I must believe are ads on the sides of web pages such as “Meet Local Singles”.

So after reading through one of these searches I was wondering what someone was trying to tell me – that I needed pharmacological supplements for fun and a match making service to meet people – thanks a lot! All that was missing was one more saying, "You're not going to wear that - are you?" and I would have felt right at home.

Other then those complaints - I am liking it. If you too have issues with Spotlight you might consider giving it a try.

Posted by Howie Fenton on October 11, 2007 | Comments (0)