Apple Rebuilds Search Infrastructure Across Platforms

[MacRumors]

Apple today announced that it has rebuilt the search infrastructure that powers key features like Spotlight, Photos, and Mail across all of its major next-generation software platforms.

The company says the index has been rearchitected to be more stable, efficient, and comprehensive, covering both old and new content. After updating, the new infrastructure will begin reindexing device content automatically.

New content will be indexed "almost immediately," Apple says, meaning users' files will become searchable much faster than before. After you update, the new search infrastructure goes to work indexing the content of your device.

Article Link: Apple Rebuilds Search Infrastructure Across Platforms

 

[t0rqx]

They rebuilt Spotlight like five times already in few years.

 

[hieranonymous]

Apple has been promising better indexing since the dog days of Copland circa 1995.

 

[vertsix]

IT’S HAPPENING!

Maybe?

Maybe this time?

Finally?

 

[SteveJobs2.0]

I hope this works because the search function is terrible, especially in Mail. I have to use the outlook app to search my hotmail email properly.

 

[jk111]

Maybe the photos tab in a Messages thread will finally show all the photos that are actually in the thread.

 

[jz0309]

Don't really care, I rarely ever use search on device

 

[mgz]

It seems clear that they have integrated vector based indexing, so that Siri AI and other search features are able to find documents based on semantic searching instead of only keyword-based searching. Should be a huge improvement.

 

[mgz]

Don't really care, I rarely ever use search on device

thank you for sharing this critical info

 

[mcbumbersnazzle]

They rebuilt spotlight last year too and they made it 2x worse

 

[polyphenol]

More than anything else, I hope whatever they have done, or will do, to search/spotlight resolves the issues many of us have been having. Making decent machines unusably slow due to unbelievably heavy CPU use by spotlight. Especially using Pages, Numbers, iCloud, etc.

I'd far rather wait a while for spotlight to catch up than have to wait to do anything else while spotlight grabs all the available processing capacity.

 

[anthony13]

I wonder if this is real. I get a new iPhone almost every year, and I'm pretty sure it spends most of the year indexing my messages. I'm not actually kidding.

 

[svish]

Waiting to try this out. Hopefully it will be much better than it is today.

 

[jack5789]

Very excited to try this!

 

[Tdude96]

I wonder if this will fix the issue where it eats up all the system memory trying to index some external drives. Seems like that's been buggy for many versions.

 

[TheMacDaddy1]

I would love to stop syncing my photos to iCloud and Google photos. I use Google photos just for the search because searching in Apple Photos is a complete joke.

 

[Candlelight]

I once tried to search a folder with five items in it. I searched for literally the file name of what I wanted.

It couldn't find it.

I'll believe this new search when I see it.

 

[CarAnalogy]

It seems clear that they have integrated vector based indexing, so that Siri AI and other search features are able to find documents based on semantic searching instead of only keyword-based searching. Should be a huge improvement.

Is this the thing everyone else did like fifteen years ago that improved search that Apple never implemented?

Their search has been legendarily bad forever.

I have a feeling that all this is tied in with the LLM integration into everything. They finally had to get their database together to properly feed the beast.

 

[frozenstar]

I wonder if this is real. I get a new iPhone almost every year, and I'm pretty sure it spends most of the year indexing my messages. I'm not actually kidding.

So you wait until it’s finally done indexing, and then you buy a new phone so it can… start indexing again?

 

[anthony13]

So you wait until it’s finally done indexing, and then you buy a new phone so it can… start indexing again?

Well when you put it that way…

 

[iTundra]

I'd far rather wait a while for spotlight to catch up than have to wait to do anything else while spotlight grans al;;l the available processing capacity.

This! I'm getting tired of running mdutil repairs every morning just so my machine will work.

It shouldn't be that difficult to place a resource limiter on Spotlight indexing. At least while the machine is busy with other stuff. When it's not doing anything at 2a have at it.