terrible awful crap pathetic search in osx finder since 10.4... WHY???

i have been using mac os since system 6, and the finder was always flawless when it came to doing a file search, and it was fast too! even way back then. there was even a time when there was multiple ways to find files (sherlock, and cmd+f). mac os finder's "find file" continued to be good (search bar in the finder window) until the release of 10.4, then it all went to ****... big time!

i don't want to elaborate on it too much, but the finders ability to find a file is now soo bad, that there have been times when it can't find a file even in the folder the window has open. i have shown this to friends and it's really pretty ridiculously pathetic. there is nothing wrong with my mac; i own several, and they all 5uck at file searching. i repair permissions and keep my machine well organized and maintained.

just now i did a search for america on my mac. did both contents and file name, i got search results, but not a track which i know i have in my itunes folder (kids in america by kim wilde). i then searched both ways IN MY MUSIC FOLDER- still nothing. then in the itunes folder... STILL NOTHING! finally, when i go into the "itunes" music" folder, then, THEN it finds the file... ***??? what's the point of the finder's finder if i already know what folder it's in? like i mentioned earlier, there have been times it hasn't been able to find a file in the current window! i can replicate that failed search. i can be in my documents folder, and have 23 files which contain the name godzilla for instance, and it will find some of them, but not all. this has happened in folders where there were nothing but files containing the same name, e.g. file-1.jpg, file-2.jpg, etc. and it would fail to see them all. how could mac finder have gone so disastrously backwards? worse than backwards even, since i've never before had a problem finding files until the spotlight search in finder was introduced.

this has been driving me nuts for years now, but it's gotten on my nerves so bad now i just had to post about it and see if there's a fix other than running a 3rd party app for actually finding files on my mac. that would be so stupid. would a finder replacement like pathfinder give me back my good old "find" functionality?

thanks for reading and for any helpful advice.

ss

ps- apple, please bring back windowshade too... please!

Message was edited by: teklife

4 macs, Mac OS X (10.5.8)

Posted on Oct 13, 2009 1:55 AM

Reply
3 replies

Nov 4, 2009 12:03 AM in response to teklife

One of the Find utilities that can help in those instances where the Spotlight or
native OS X Find may seem inadequate, is this one that's been around awhile:

EasyFind 4.5:
http://www.apple.com/downloads/macosx/systemdiskutilities/easyfind.html

I've used older versions of this briefly, prior to Tiger; this version is for 10.4 & Later.
Perhaps it may help resolve some issues you've found in your use of Spotlight+Find.

There also is some kind of third-party software to supplement or replace missing
Windowshade. Not sure the actual name, but there is something like it for OS X.

A simple search brings up WindowShade X (unsanity) a shareware, for $13.50:
http://unsanity.com/haxies/wsx

Not sure if those kinds of things are what you could use. There may be others.

PS: The Mac OS X Finder does not function at all like the OS 9.2.2 Finder.
The premise of the Finder in pre-X is more like a noble access control center.

Good luck & happy computing, in any case! 🙂

Oct 13, 2009 7:28 AM in response to teklife

Have Spotlight 'index the hard disk drive' so searches, esp with that,
would be a bit faster. Be sure any external drives not needed in the
search parameters are excluded from Indexing; otherwise things get
even slower, since Indexing an external clone or huge music file on
another drive could take significant time. And slow your access, too.

Spotlight tips:
http://www.thexlab.com/faqs/stopspotlightindex.html

There should be some reference to indexing spotlight in your OS help.
The "Find" seems to work OK still in Tiger 10.4.11; and there are free
utilities that reintroduced a basic Find, somewhere I have one of them.
Even "Find" works better if the reference drive is indexed in general.

Good luck & happy computing! 🙂

Nov 2, 2009 9:37 AM in response to teklife

This is a horrible problem for our department.
10.4 machines will not search drives on my 10.5 machine.

It looks like I will need to run applejack first thing every morning to allow my 10.4 coworkers to search my 10.5 hard drives. I can suggest the following which have worked here.

Start up from the original DVD disk and run disk utility.
Download and Run applejack deleting the cache files.

In twenty plus years, I never had such problems with searches. OS 7-8-9 and even 10.3 worked fine. 10.4 and 10.5 have been dismal failures. When a third party utility needs to be run all the time just to find files, something is very wrong with the latest and greatest operating systems.

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terrible awful crap pathetic search in osx finder since 10.4... WHY???

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