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spotlight... pretty rubbish

meathane

meathane

macrumors member
Original poster
if uve updated ur os (ie not done a clean install) u'll find spotlight is pretty rubbish. some things will only come up if uve opened them at least once. thats soooo RUBBISH!! it did the whole indexing system thing too, its just a bit crap

dont get me wrong, tiger is great, but its so much easier to criticise!
 
Seems to work fine for me. Spotlight was the #1 reason for buying Tiger and so far it hasn't let me down. Personally, I have thousands of files and emails (most not opened since the restore) but Spotlight has indexed most if not all of them (it's a little hard to tell).

Very happy with Spotlight so far. 😀
 
i agree with kelmon

it is blazing fast. i have 1 gb of text files and it took 3 hours to do the initial index on my internal and 26 min to index the external (26 gb of music)

and now, witha few keystrokes i've found anything and everything. Its simply the best thing int iger
 
It shouldn't make a difference if the file has been opened or not with Spotlight. Indexing is basically doing that already, and scanning the contents of all your files. The only thing I've heard of people having problems with is iPhoto keywords, but that's easily solved. (create a new keyword and apply it to all your photos, once it's been applied, remove it, and all your existing keywords should work in Spotlight)

I was very impressed with it though. I did a search for . wth my Panther restore dvd in the drive (I had just re-installed the apps off my restore disc) and it brought up about 24,000 results from both it and my hard drive in six seconds. 😱

I did the same with an XP CD, just to see if Apple had maybe stored an index on the disc (I think they have) and it brought up about 30,000 results from the disc and my HDD in about 23 seconds! I think it must have indexed the disc at the same time or something, because after that, no matter what I was searching for, it came up in 2-6 seconds.
 
Well, ignoring all the obvious things to pick on in the OP...and considering that I've found it to be fairly effective too, but I did an archive and install, can anyone confirm that the way spotlight initially indexes is actually different if you upgrade and install? I definitely get spotlight hits on files that had never previously been opened in Tiger.
 
Just wanted to add, I was searching for some journal articles this morning when I realized that I had them on a network drive at my department, but not here. I used WebDAV to copy them to my hard drive, and they showed up in a spotlight pretty much immediately. 🙂
 
i had a folder in the pictures folder called 'xmas wallpapers' and one of them was a robin, called robin_1074x628 or whatever. i searched for robin and had 7 results, none of which were that file. i clicked show all, and its showed me 'all'.

with that still open i navigated to the file in the finder and open it in preview, then i saw the spotlight window in the background update.

thats bollocks
 
There's obviously a problem with your Spotlight index since most people's Spotlights are happily finding documents that were created and haven't been opened since Panther. Have you tried forcing Spotlight to re-index?

There appear to be two ways to do it - use the mdutil in Terminal or exclude your HD from the Spotlight preferences and then include it again.
 
an example

if anyone would like to see a real life working emaxple of how rubbish spotlight can be, it can be found here:

http://wengtheband.co.uk/mac/spotlightrubbish.mov

this is running on a very new iBook 12", we didn't do a clean install, just an upgrade.

to be honest, i think spotlight is pretty amazing... when it works. i have it running fine on my eMac, but then again, how do i know that? i could be searching for things that exist but ain't coming up. i dont expect this inconsistency at all from apple
 
Yeah, just re-index it. I've seen this happen to a few other people on the net. They wind up with a goofy first Spotlight database. Maybe you rebooted while it was indexing the first time.

On mine, it indexed for about 20 minutes, yet, I couldn't use it for the rest of that day because every time I'd search for something, it started reindexing more stuff with the indefinite "barbershop pole" instead of a progress bar.

And on a side note - you are obviously having a problem. Surely this isn't the designed behavior of Spotlight, as seen even in the Steve-demos. Instead of declaring that it's rubbish, why not ask what your problem could be (answer: bad index)?
 
'just re-index'

im pissed off with it and saying its rubbish because there is no 're-index' button in spotlights preferences, nor should there be, it should just do it. maybe deselect movies and reselect it, then reboot? no, that doesnt work. there should be a re-index button if its gonna piss about.

i say gimme 10.4.1 asap
 
meathane said:
'just re-index'

im pissed off with it and saying its rubbish because there is no 're-index' button in spotlights preferences, nor should there be, it should just do it. maybe deselect movies and reselect it, then reboot? no, that doesnt work. there should be a re-index button if its gonna piss about.

i say gimme 10.4.1 asap
Click to expand...

works fine on my powerbook. i think you need to chill out and report some bugs and maybe they'll get fixed in 10.4.1. whining about it won't help any in this case, it won't just magically fix itself. http://bugreport.apple.com go report your bugs and let's just say leave the "rubbish" and bad spelling out of your bug report. give the facts, how you can reproduce it etc etc and then they can have some idea of how to fix it and what's going on. it seems to work fine for most people, you have an problem and you seem to be a part of smaller handful of people. just because it doesn't work for "you" doesn't make it rubbish. it's new technology and it's a known thing that most big point releases are buggy, you should've known that going in most likely, or at least done your research first.
 
meathane said:
'just re-index'

im pissed off with it and saying its rubbish because there is no 're-index' button in spotlights preferences, nor should there be, it should just do it. maybe deselect movies and reselect it, then reboot? no, that doesnt work. there should be a re-index button if its gonna piss about.

i say gimme 10.4.1 asap
Click to expand...

If you don't mind me asking, what exactly do you want? Do you want help with your issue, or do you just want to whine that Spotlight isn't working for you?

I (like so many others) did an upgrade and Spotlight works just fine. Yes, it should "just work", but you have obviously encountered a bug. Try re-indexing, if that fixes it, submit a bug report to Apple, including how you fixed it, and hopefully it will be fixed in 10.4.1. If you just want to keep complaining have fun, but don't expect people to continue offering advice.
 
meathane said:
some things will only come up if uve opened them at least once. thats soooo RUBBISH!! it did the whole indexing system thing too, its just a bit crap

dont get me wrong, tiger is great, but its so much easier to criticise!
Click to expand...

Let's see.... The reports on Spotlight are incredible, the users quotes are all positive. You have an issue. But instead of coming here and asking for help, you call the whole product and concept rubbish, peppering it with innacurate facts.
I have over 75 THOUSAND files on my desktop, and Spotlight found one of the oldest and the most obscure in seconds, and it was a PDF to boot.
 
meathane said:
if anyone would like to see a real life working emaxple of how rubbish spotlight can be, it can be found here:

http://wengtheband.co.uk/mac/spotlightrubbish.mov
Click to expand...

Link doesn't work.

And yes, Spotlight works flawlessly for me, as it has done for most people. It's annoying it didn't work for you, could be a conflict with something you've got installed or maybe you just need to re-index like a lot of forummers have already suggested. Or you could just keep on whining...
 
Yikes, it's a brand new feature (that works for most people). It's bound to have some issues for some users. I'm getting the impression you really aren't looking for help, but just looking to trash it. You're bordering "troll-ville." 🙄
 
andrewfee said:
The only thing I've heard of people having problems with is iPhoto keywords, but that's easily solved. (create a new keyword and apply it to all your photos, once it's been applied, remove it, and all your existing keywords should work in Spotlight)
Click to expand...

thanks for the tip. KeywordAssitant + iPhoto 04 = awesome.
 
I can see your problem after watching that movie, something is wrong, try reindexing it, above me post is a post By mkrishnan who has a link telling you how to reindex Spotlight. Its probably that when your mac first indexed itself something went wrong, nothing is 100% perfect, and well problems like this will probably happen to 1% of people, and well unlucky for you, you are in that 1%. Instead of moaning and telling everybody that spotlight is rubbish, try to fix the problem, its not going to get any better by moaning
 
I've had no trouble with Spotlight, but it doesn't do anything for me that Quicksilver can't also, and QS is faster. 😛
 
DaiKirai said:
I've had no trouble with Spotlight, but it doesn't do anything for me that Quicksilver can't also, and QS is faster. 😛
Click to expand...

QS doesn't look inside files (normally), so I use Spotlight to "find' files. I use QS to "open" things I already know about (and to control iTunes)


After reading this thread, the word "Rubbish" has lost all meaning. 🙂
 
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