Time for some serious Spotlight enhancing

Posted by Dennis Sellers Oct 26, 2006 at 1:58am

Google has announced a new service to let web site publishers build their own search engines using the company’s huge index of page links and (as noted by the IDG News Service) there’s considerable demand from publishers for custom search engines because they realize that providing that capability makes their web sites more attractive to their visitors. This seems to provide unintentional justification behind Spotlight as a navigation tool for Finder.

However, Apple needs to put in some serious improvements for using Spotlight on the desktop. While Spotlight is very usable today (I use it all the time), it has some big holes in what you can search for and how you can alter and filter the results to get what you want. One of the bigger holes is in the ability to find things when you don’t know enough about what you are searching for to precise identify it. Plus, the little “tricks” like using kind:app or kind:contact are something many end users don’t understand or realize how to implement.

It’s been speculated that a search engine such as Spotlight could become the primary Finder interface of the future. However, there’s nothing to indicate this will happen with Mac OS X 10.5 (“Leopard”), though Apple has pitched the “improved” Spotlight. But what they have publicly shown is a far cry from a search oriented Finder environment. So is a real change in store for Finder a real surprise for all? Regardless, some serious tweaking and improving of Spotlight would make a good search tool even better.

Thoughts? Write me at daseller@earthlink.net

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