The purpose of this thread is to try to discover which, if any, features of Spotlight do not work (correctly or at all) for
b all
users.
To that purpose, please limit messages in this topic to either examples of features you believe don't work for anybody or a counter-example showing that a mentioned feature works for someone.
My candidate nonfunctional feature example is the "invisible" search criteria, which I can not get to yield a single hit while searching in any container from "computer" on down to individual folders known to contain invisible items.
AMEN, Urs. I bought Tiger because of Spotlight. Now I'm dumping Tiger, returning/upgrading to Panther, because of Spotlight. Spotlight didn't work as I needed under 10.4-10.4.2; now, under 10.4.3, it's totally useless, will find little but calendar events.
Could I improve Spotlight's search results by reindexing or something? Maybe, but why should I have to? Never did before with any OS prior to 10.4. And I'm not about to start now, especially when I'll have no confidence in the results.
And speaking of confidence, it's going to be a long time before I have the confidence to plunk down $100 for the next major upgrade without some assurance that it will, indeed, work as promised.
I can't be bothered with any of this. I just look in occasionally to see if Apple has fixed Spotlight.
Meantime I'm back in Panther, and finding everything I need, every time, fast.
Here's my addition to the list of things that don't work in Spotlight:
SAVING SEARCHES ! Why on earth would I want to save a search when I can just hit Cmd + F any time I want to, and search? That's hw it works in Panther......
I may come back again some time, to see if Spotlight has been fixed, i.e. discontinued.
Most - but not all - Spotlight's worst shortcomings stem from its inability to perform
any search of a location without an index. Apple also made SL the exclusive OS mechanism for searching your computer. So for example:
-- Spotlight automatically excludes certain system directories from its index. These folders cannot be searched even for something as simple as a name. (Which we know, thanks to the preceding 15 years of Mac OS searches, is a fairly simple undertaking.) Apple's representations to the contrary, Spotlight does
not search your entire computer. Worse, there's no knowing which directories are deliberately overlooked. (I guess that this hidden exclusion list can be tweaked, but it requires 'voodoo knowledge', and may result in an index that has to update several times a minute to keep pace with changing system files.) The upshot is that if a file search comes up negative, there is no way of knowing whether the file is absent from your machine, or instead just in one of these excluded directories.
-- Spotlight cannot search an external drive without first indexing it. This may be okay for drives you use on a daily basis, but you can forget about "quickly" finding an old file on an archival drive that you haven't spun up since 10.2.8. This shortcoming also makes one-time drive attachments (e.g., a Powerbook in target disk mode to help troubleshoot a friend's machine) much less useful - those machines are effectively invisible to one another.
-- Spotlight cannot search networked drives. (I don't know if this is "at all", or if SL has to create an index of each of the other machines it can see before it can search them. Either way it's a nightmare.)
-- If you choose to protect the contents of documents in a folder by adding the folder to your privacy list, you render the folder altogether invisible to Spotlight and it cannot be searched for any purpose at all.
Apart from these index-related problems, Spotlight's rules about embedded strings are inconsistent and non-obvious - indeed counterintuitive; the 'results' list often gives no indication of why a particular file was determined to fit the search query; the default cmd-f search criteria are bizarre and can't be changed without - again, 'voodoo knowledge'.
Those are just a few things off the top of my head.
