3 ms·

Nah I think they’re just bad at search, macOS Spotlight search has to be the most slow janky search I have ever used.

by cedws 1y ago

DrewADesign 1y ago
You haven’t used windows search recently I take it.
- ffsm8 1y ago
  Eh, as a person then uses both occasionally... I feel like they're pretty on-par? Is the osx search performing so much better on your end? If so, in results or speed? Because for me, both osx and windows searches leave me annoyed anytime I try to use them, it's so bad that I usually prefer to use CLI tools on both platforms ... Or were you just saying it cuz it's funny?
  - DrewADesign 1y ago
    I’m sure there’s some indexing thing I could take care of, but windows edges out spotlight for me for both ineffectiveness and slowness on every machine I use. For me, windows used to be far better than spotlight. It’s strange to me how much better the command line tools do essentially the same job, and that, anecdotally, the GUI ones seem to be getting worse?
  - prmoustache 1y ago
    On the azure win11 desktop I am using professionally (only windows I use) a large fraction of the time you can't even search anything because the windows menu just freeze.
    - ffsm8 1y ago
      Same for me, But OSX seems to have a similar issue at least on my MacBook Pro M1. I occasionally get the multicolor disk spinner which locks all UI interactions for a few seconds (10-30s) until it unfreezes and works as before again... Haven't been able to figure out the exact cause for it, feels very random.
      - asimpletune 1y ago
        I think it got slow on M1 when AI features came out. I recently disabled them in and trying that out.
        DrewADesign 1y ago
        Don’t do that! You’ll be left behind by society— rendered penniless and fatally inconvenienced by the lack of tooling to exponentially improve your productivity!
      - danaris 1y ago
        I know that occasionally, the Spotlight index can get corrupted, and you have to manually delete it and let it regenerate. If you search for that with your current OS version, you should be able to find some decent instructions for it. (My guess is that the Windows issue is something similar? but I have no experience with it, so don't know if it can be fixed in a similar way)
    - DrewADesign 1y ago
      While it’s clearly not everybody, in my and a number of other users’ personal onedrives, search hasn’t worked since May. Zero results for any search in any context. No response from MS other than essentially “yep! Sorry! Working on it! Promise! In the interim, try just remembering where everything is maybe! lol!”
    - dr-detroit 1y ago
      [dead]
mathgeek 1y ago
Which I find really sad because at one point OSX had search quality that was really satisfying. That was maybe twenty years ago for me.
- tim333 1y ago
  My favourite was back in os7. I didn't really use the file system because you just started typing the name of the file and it came up instantly. I'm not sure why companies have to break simple stuff that works well.
- kergonath 1y ago
  Spotlight was a revelation in Tiger. I don’t know exactly when it degraded but it’s a damn shame how annoying it’s become.
  - hylaride 1y ago
    MacOS to me started to regress ~2012. I can’t remember what specific release it was, but one major MacOS release around then no longer remembered my MacBook’s external monitor layouts between work and home anymore and it was always “random”. Spotlight, AirTunes/Airplay, iTunes, etc all also just slowly degraded. It’s like Steve Jobs was personally doing all QA and it just stopped when he died. I remember iTunes genius being SO GOOD that it cost me a fortune in song purchases, but now that apple just gets my monthly music payment, discovering new music is hard again.
    - kjkjadksj 1y ago
      Mojave was a high watermark. 32 bit support still. Relatively polished.
- xp84 1y ago
  Yes. Spotlight search for the Application launcher use-case was close to the speed and quality of LaunchBar (which still works that way of course) when Apple first introduced the command-space shortcut, on vastly slower “oughts” computers. Today it’s much slower and less consistent. However we know that they could easily do a simple search effectively because Apple’s Launchpad has a perfect app search built in. If you give Launchpad a global shortcut you can press <shortcut>saf<return> and be assured it will instantly open safari every time. Of course, LaunchBar (no affiliation, but I’ve been using it for 22 years) still beats that in every way.
artursapek 1y ago
They definitely are bad at search. When I type “safar” into iOS settings, it says “no results for “safar”” while it looks for the fucking built-in browser’s search page.
- kstrauser 1y ago
  Weird. I get lots of relevant results with Safari at the top. Which somehow makes it a little worse: I’d naively think we should get identical results.

Nah I think they’re just bad at search, macOS Spotlight search has to be the most slow janky search I have ever used.

by cedws 1y ago

Nah I think they’re just bad at search, macOS Spotlight search has to be the most slow janky search I have ever used.

DrewADesign 1y ago

You haven’t used windows search recently I take it.

ffsm8 1y ago
Eh, as a person then uses both occasionally... I feel like they're pretty on-par? Is the osx search performing so much better on your end? If so, in results or speed? Because for me, both osx and windows searches leave me annoyed anytime I try to use them, it's so bad that I usually prefer to use CLI tools on both platforms ... Or were you just saying it cuz it's funny?
- DrewADesign 1y ago
  I’m sure there’s some indexing thing I could take care of, but windows edges out spotlight for me for both ineffectiveness and slowness on every machine I use. For me, windows used to be far better than spotlight. It’s strange to me how much better the command line tools do essentially the same job, and that, anecdotally, the GUI ones seem to be getting worse?
- prmoustache 1y ago
  On the azure win11 desktop I am using professionally (only windows I use) a large fraction of the time you can't even search anything because the windows menu just freeze.
  - ffsm8 1y ago
    Same for me, But OSX seems to have a similar issue at least on my MacBook Pro M1. I occasionally get the multicolor disk spinner which locks all UI interactions for a few seconds (10-30s) until it unfreezes and works as before again... Haven't been able to figure out the exact cause for it, feels very random.
    - asimpletune 1y ago
      I think it got slow on M1 when AI features came out. I recently disabled them in and trying that out.
      - DrewADesign 1y ago
        Don’t do that! You’ll be left behind by society— rendered penniless and fatally inconvenienced by the lack of tooling to exponentially improve your productivity!
    - danaris 1y ago
      I know that occasionally, the Spotlight index can get corrupted, and you have to manually delete it and let it regenerate. If you search for that with your current OS version, you should be able to find some decent instructions for it. (My guess is that the Windows issue is something similar? but I have no experience with it, so don't know if it can be fixed in a similar way)
  - DrewADesign 1y ago
    While it’s clearly not everybody, in my and a number of other users’ personal onedrives, search hasn’t worked since May. Zero results for any search in any context. No response from MS other than essentially “yep! Sorry! Working on it! Promise! In the interim, try just remembering where everything is maybe! lol!”
  - dr-detroit 1y ago
    [dead]

mathgeek 1y ago

Which I find really sad because at one point OSX had search quality that was really satisfying. That was maybe twenty years ago for me.

tim333 1y ago
My favourite was back in os7. I didn't really use the file system because you just started typing the name of the file and it came up instantly. I'm not sure why companies have to break simple stuff that works well.
kergonath 1y ago
Spotlight was a revelation in Tiger. I don’t know exactly when it degraded but it’s a damn shame how annoying it’s become.
- hylaride 1y ago
  MacOS to me started to regress ~2012. I can’t remember what specific release it was, but one major MacOS release around then no longer remembered my MacBook’s external monitor layouts between work and home anymore and it was always “random”. Spotlight, AirTunes/Airplay, iTunes, etc all also just slowly degraded. It’s like Steve Jobs was personally doing all QA and it just stopped when he died. I remember iTunes genius being SO GOOD that it cost me a fortune in song purchases, but now that apple just gets my monthly music payment, discovering new music is hard again.
  - kjkjadksj 1y ago
    Mojave was a high watermark. 32 bit support still. Relatively polished.
xp84 1y ago
Yes. Spotlight search for the Application launcher use-case was close to the speed and quality of LaunchBar (which still works that way of course) when Apple first introduced the command-space shortcut, on vastly slower “oughts” computers. Today it’s much slower and less consistent. However we know that they could easily do a simple search effectively because Apple’s Launchpad has a perfect app search built in. If you give Launchpad a global shortcut you can press <shortcut>saf<return> and be assured it will instantly open safari every time. Of course, LaunchBar (no affiliation, but I’ve been using it for 22 years) still beats that in every way.

artursapek 1y ago

They definitely are bad at search. When I type “safar” into iOS settings, it says “no results for “safar”” while it looks for the fucking built-in browser’s search page.

kstrauser 1y ago
Weird. I get lots of relevant results with Safari at the top. Which somehow makes it a little worse: I’d naively think we should get identical results.