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Ask HN: Why is on-device search terrible?
My search experience across a lot of products is, to put it bluntly, garbage. Apple Mail, Gmail App on Android, Finder search, Windows Explorer search, MacOs Spotlight... rarely find what I'm looking for.
Why is it so bad? Are indexes / Io ops really that expensive?
- f1refly 4y agoTry `find / -iname "foo" 2>/dev/null`, works every time. Also can take quite some time.
- hellfish 4y agofd takes less time, would recommend
- Sohcahtoa82 4y agoOn Windows, the fastest way seems to use WizTree to scan the whole hard drive (Takes only a couple seconds to scan an SSD, and even my 2 TB spinning HD with >900,000 files takes less than 15 seconds) and then search the results for the filename.
- clockwork-dev 4y agoHaven't tried this one, thanks. There's also Everything [0] which is usually my favorite search for Windows. Fast and supports regex. [0] https://www.voidtools.com/ https://www.voidtools.com/
- rococode 4y agoEverything search is incredible, for me it serves nearly instant searches for 15TB+ of data without any trouble. I think the secret sauce is a background service which continuously updates the file index. I also like WinDirStat a lot for Windows file management, which is not really for search but gives a great view of disk usage.
- delta_p_delta_x 4y ago> I think the secret sauce is a background service which continuously updates the file index Actually, the secret sauce to both WizTree's and Everything's speed is the NTFS Master File Table (MFT) [1]. [1]: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/fileio/master-file-table https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/fileio/maste...
- hackrnusr 4y agoIs there an open source analog of voidtools Everything yet? Have never been able to find anything.
- pynappo 4y agoI've seen flow launcher recommended but haven't personally tried it out yet
- hackrnusr 4y agoThanks for the suggestion. Probably worth benchmarking against fzf/ripgrep when I can find the time.
- kid64 4y agoThere's this, which I haven't tried: https://github.com/ChrisS85/FastFileSearch https://github.com/ChrisS85/FastFileSearch SwiftSearch is excellent and uses the same tech: https://sourceforge.net/projects/swiftsearch/ https://sourceforge.net/projects/swiftsearch/
- yonz 4y agoSo why do the stock implementations suck?
- bravetraveler 4y agomlocate/plocate (for locate and updatedb) are also nice Even if the db is not up to date, it's likely faster to update/search than rely on find I find simple searches by file name useful, but that's also because I'm fairly diligent to keep my filesystems organized The launcher called Albert is helpful as a sort of Spotlight stand-in with Linux (maybe elsewhere?). It does math, runs things, and can have things like a dictionary added. I believe it can also search
- bravetraveler 4y agoLost my ability to edit, but here's a link to Albert: https://albertlauncher.github.io/ https://albertlauncher.github.io/ The demonstrations there confirm searching... and way more than I can do justice here
- abdullahkhalids 4y agoAlbert is pretty good. I also catfish https://launchpad.net/catfish-search https://launchpad.net/catfish-search which is excellent. Also can search within text files.
- yonz 4y agoAre either of you concerned about giving permissions to almost everything? I think that was why I uninstalled Albert.
- abdullahkhalids 4y agoI am not sure what special permissions you are talking about that Albert gets? Just like any other software, it can do whatever the user can do. As far as I understand it doesn't "phone home" or anything with my data. And doesn't really delete or move files in any way.
- bravetraveler 4y agoA bit, I'll admit I haven't audited it as much as I should -- are you aware of anything in particular? I install it through the Fedora repositories and only use the bundled extensions, so I don't worry too much about it
- runjake 4y agoData point: Spotlight and the Gmail app searches work great for me. What issues are you seeing? Have you tried rebuilding your Spotlight index? https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201716 https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201716 Have you tried rebuilding your Mail.app index? https://support.apple.com/guide/mail/rebuild-mailboxes-mlhlp1227/mac https://support.apple.com/guide/mail/rebuild-mailboxes-mlhlp...
- yonz 4y agoEmail search using the Gmail app on mobile works for you? That's a surprise to me, what is your setup? iPhone/Android, Download all emails / 90 days? I did rebuild my index, I have a 1TB SSD drive and even excluded external drives.
- MH15 4y agoiOS spotlight used to work well- now there's a three second delay at times while it fetches the internet-enabled features. All I want is it to find my apps for me!
- prepend 4y agoI wish there was a way to disable internet search. I used spotlight to open apps for years and now it’s not very efficient, so I have to organize icons and stuff.
- rwalle 4y agoYou can and it is well "documented": https://www.howtogeek.com/224344/how-to-disable-spotlights-web-searches-on-mac-iphone-and-ipad/ https://www.howtogeek.com/224344/how-to-disable-spotlights-w...
- yonz 4y agoDid that speed up your spotlight search? Yeah, I used to love being able to open apps with CMD+space <app name> enter. Now it doesn't work. And yes, I have apps enabled in spotlight.
- luckman212 4y agoCheck out this post of mine[0]. TL;DR the "fix" is to reset all network settings, or alternately, make sure content search is enabled for all your apps in Settings. [0] https://www.reddit.com/r/ios/comments/xg6vhr/ios16_5_second_lag_when_searching_spotlight/ https://www.reddit.com/r/ios/comments/xg6vhr/ios16_5_second_...
- yuppie_scum 4y agoIf you’ve ever ran a Mongo cluster you know that yes, search/indexing is expensive
- abrookewood 4y agoOn Windows, please try Everything from Void Tools. It is insanely quick: https://www.voidtools.com/en-au/support/everything/ https://www.voidtools.com/en-au/support/everything/
- zalebz 4y agolaunch Windows Terminal -> winget install voidtools.Everything if you're on windows and haven't discovered the newest Terminal experience nor winget, you're welcome
- SOLAR_FIELDS 4y agoThis is finally the Windows experience that developers wanted. I thought that OneGet (PackageManagement) was going to be the way almost a decade ago, but that fizzled out. The guy that wrote that one seems to be totally on board with this though: https://github.com/microsoft/winget-cli/discussions/186 https://github.com/microsoft/winget-cli/discussions/186. I think that the guy that wrote OneGet had it mostly right, but it seems (as a layman who knows nothing about Microsoft) that he simply did not have the political power to make it actually get picked up by the higher ups at Microsoft and that someone else did which is why it took an extra half-decade to actually happen. I do wonder what would have happened in my career had OneGet actually taken off . Previously I used to work exclusively on Windows, and I now work exclusively on non-Windows machines. At the time that I switched developer experience was one of my primary frustrations - and lack of a proper Homebrew/apt/yum like experience on Windows was a non-insignificant part of that. Chocolatey was OK at the time, but paled in comparison to its MacOS and Linux equivalents.
- garbagecoder 4y agoIs it different/better than choco?
- wrldos 4y agoI don’t use search. I carefully put things where I will find them.
- aaron695 4y ago[dead]
- NoThisIsMe 4y agoIt's pretty great on GNOME tbh. It worked well on Windows 7 too.
- Am4TIfIsER0ppos 4y agoIts deliberate to dissuade you from keeping anything on your device. Upload it to the cloud and let google, apple, microsoft, and the government search it for you. However yes i/o is time consuming and you can see that when programs update their indexes.
- yonz 4y agoBut the index update wouldn't be in the critical path (when a user searches). Unless the index size requirements are so large you can't do it on machine (doubt it)
- Am4TIfIsER0ppos 4y agoNo, an index wouldn't be updated the moment you want to use it. I notice when locate and man perform their updates because my computer is busy while they do. Granted I think it is low priority but I still see the result in btop (or any other system monitor program). find isn't quick unless I repeat the same search and the directories are cached. I am not complaining about spending time on i/o and processing to make an index. I merely stated that it does take time. I didn't think Windows' one was worth it when I last used Windows so I would always disable it but I haven't done likewise on linux.
- Sesse__ 4y agoFWIW, man-db index updates got a lot faster in the latest versions (roughly 40x).
- pjot 4y agoOn the other hand, search in Photos on iPhone is _scary_ good. Searching for “baseball” will return pictures of a baseball, a team playing baseball, photos that were taken at the location of a baseball stadium, AND photos that literally have the word baseball in text somewhere within the photo.
- specialist 4y agoOvercast's local text search is also turrible. It very much regularly impedes my usage.
- simne 4y agoThis has same roots as why far manager (norton commander clone) does not popular on MacOs. - For fast search need to use indexes, which tend to be few times larger than data. Far on MacOs show 4-5 versions of same file ("timemachine" version system). I think this is just psychology question, people don't like when appear those strange files.