Apple Readies Search Technology For Macs

[Stinkysteve]

Story here:
http://www.informationweek.com/story/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=22102553

Apple Readies Search Technology For Macs June 28, 2004


CEO Steve Jobs says the technology, called Spotlight, will be part of next year's Mac OS X upgrade and will let users easily search the contents of their computers.
By Aaron Ricadela
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Apple Computer plans to launch technology called Spotlight for searching the contents of Macintosh computers when the company releases an operating-system update next year, CEO Steve Jobs said Monday. If it works as advertised, Spotlight would deliver for Mac users capabilities similar to what Microsoft has said it plans to include in its next version of Windows--which is still several years from release.

Speaking at an Apple developer conference in San Francisco, Jobs demonstrated Spotlight software, quickly scanning a Mac's hard drive for documents, E-mail messages, address book entries, and other files. The software scans an index of the contents for files with compatible formats--including Word and Excel documents, Adobe PDF and Photoshop files, and most image and movie file types--as well as "metadata" about the author or copyright holder of a document that may not appear in its contents. Apple plans to include Spotlight in version 10.4 of its Mac OS X operating system, code-named Tiger. It's due in the first half of next year.

"It's easier to fund something from among a billion Web pages with Google than it is to find something on your hard disk," Jobs said. Microsoft is working to include more natural, text-based searching of a PC's contents in its next version of Windows, code-named Longhorn, but Jobs said Apple will deliver similar functionality first. "We think we are years ahead of Longhorn," he said.

Jobs also said that half of Mac users now run OS X, and he pointed to new applications that run on the platform, including Oracle's 10g database, PeopleSoft's business apps, and Sun Microsystems' Java development tools. Other recent applications that have appeared for OS X include Microsoft Office 2004, Quark's QPS desktop publishing system, and Borland's Java development tools. Sun this week is sponsoring a Java developer conference that's being held across the street from Apple's conference.

Apple also said it will ship three new flat-panel displays this summer, including a 30-inch LCD monitor that's scheduled to go on sale in August and will be priced at $3,300.

[Smoke]

"It's easier to fund something from among a billion Web pages with Google than it is to find something on your hard disk," Jobs said. Microsoft is working to include more natural, text-based searching of a PC's contents in its next version of Windows, code-named Longhorn, but Jobs said Apple will deliver similar functionality first. "We think we are years ahead of Longhorn," he said.

All this sounds like text searching of all documents on a system, which Windows can already do. I don't understand why Steve Jobs is hyped up, unless he's on coke....

[Stinkysteve]

All this sounds like text searching of all documents on a system, which Windows can already do. I don't understand why Steve Jobs is hyped up, unless he's on coke....

If he's on coke that may explain a lot!
There has been a function that has been on the Mac for quite a while now to search. I think this new search function will dig even deeper.

[Stinkysteve]

Story here:
http://www.internetweek.com/breakingNews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=22103515

Microsoft, Apple Make It A Big Week For The Search Market

By Aaron Ricadela, InformationWeek


The browser wars may be over, but the battle of the search engines is just heating up.



Microsoft this week launched a test version of a new search engine that could challenge Google Inc. and Yahoo Inc. by letting computer users search their PCs and the Web with a single tool. Microsoft also unveiled a Google-esque MSN search site, eliminating paid advertising from main search results and introducing a simple, fast-loading design.



Meanwhile, Apple Computer early this week demonstrated a search engine, due next year, that will let Mac users quickly comb the contents of their computers for hard-to-find items such as photos and E-mails. Apple says the technology will give it a lead on similar functionality Microsoft plans to include in its next version of Windows, code-named Longhorn. "It's easier to find something from among a billion Web pages with Google than it is to find something on your hard disk," Apple CEO Steve Jobs said at a developers conference in San Francisco this week.



In Internet search, Microsoft trails Google, which is preparing for an initial public stock offering, and No. 2 Yahoo. But the software company is investing heavily to catch up in a market it came to late, just as it did in the market for Web browsers in the '90s. MSN's ad business reached $1 billion for the fiscal year ended June 30 with "minimal" search-technology investment, Microsoft director Lisa Gurry says. In the next five to eight years, "the trajectory for the search business is incredibly high," she says.



The new search engine that Microsoft started publicly testing this week--at techpreview.search.msn.com--employs a new algorithm Microsoft is developing for release within the year that will replace Yahoo technology used on MSN today. Over time, the algorithm could deliver direct answers to users' queries in addition to Web-site links. The software will also likely let users search the Web, E-mail messages, and PC documents, possibly without having a Web browser open. At the same time, Microsoft is developing a new file system for Longhorn, which is due in 2006 at the earliest, that could make searching a variety of sources easier.



Microsoft's MSN work is likely to reach the market before the Longhorn efforts. "Right now, the fast-track work at Microsoft is going on at MSN," says Matt Rosoff, an analyst at IT consulting company Directions on Microsoft. "They'll do some fairly sophisticated things regarding search--and not just of the Internet. The first concrete new search tools we're going to see out of Microsoft are going to come out of MSN, and they're going to come out well before Longhorn."



Yet Apple could build a lead on Microsoft in the race to help users more easily find what they want on their PCs. In an upgrade to its OS X operating system, code-named Tiger and due next year, Apple plans to release technology called Spotlight that can scan a Mac's file system, plus indexes of documents' contents and metadata about their authorship and attributes. At the San Francisco developers conference, Jobs demonstrated Spotlight searches for Office documents, E-mails, address-book entries, Adobe PDF files, and images.



The ability to quickly find images will become more important as use of Macs and PCs to manage photos and videos grows. "Neither Apple nor Microsoft has said that this global hard-drive search is trivial," says Tim Bajarin, president of consulting company Creative Strategies. "But it is clear if Apple delivers Tiger in the first half of '05, they're going to have quite a lead on Longhorn in that area."


And this too.
http://www.internetweek.com/allStories/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=22103353

Microsoft Previews In-House Search Technology

By Gregg Keizer, TechWeb News


Microsoft on Thursday gave Internet users their first look at the company's new search technology.


Dubbed MSN Search Technology Preview, the alpha is available in MSN's Sandbox, a part of the portal for showing off new and upcoming features. Unlike MSN Search, which relies on technology licensed from Yahoo to produce results, the preview posts hit lists based on Microsoft's own Web crawler and the company's proprietary search algorithms.


The crawler, named MSNBot, has been indexing Web pages for about a month, and so far as logged about 1 billion pages, according to Microsoft. That's about a third of the number indexed by Google.



The unveiling of the preview was just one of the announcements made Thursday by Microsoft, which debuted a refreshed MSN Search that mimics Google in several ways. A new stripped-to-the-bone home page looks very much like Google, but also offers links to popular MSN portal destinations, such as Hotmail and MSN Messenger. MSN Search has also done away with paid-inclusion results, better distinguishes advertisers' sponsored links, and has limited the number of those sponsored links on the first page of a search's results.


MSN Search, which once used Google's technology to churn out results, now uses Yahoo's. Microsoft executives, including chairman Bill Gates, however, have repeatedly said that the company will replace Yahoo's with its own search engine before the year is out.


"They have the basic architecture in place," said Charlene Li, a principal analyst with Forrester. "Now it's more of a matter of scaling it. I don't think it'll be a problem meeting that deadline."


Other analysts said that this first look showed that Microsoft is serious about search.


"It's a good first effort," said Danny Sullivan, the editor of SearchEngineWatch.com, a search industry site. "With some minor tweaks they should have a decent product."


Search has gotten increasingly competitive, with several major moves in the last months, including Yahoo dropping Google's technology in preference for its own, Microsoft swapping Google for Yahoo, and Google unveiling its IPO plans. Rumors have circulated that Google is also doing development in desktop search, which would intrude on Microsoft's traditional Windows turf.


Analysts disagreed, however, whether the Microsoft move into search would make for sleepless nights at Yahoo and Google.


"They should have been worried long before this," said Li. "Yahoo and Google have just the technology and money, but Microsoft has not only the technology and the money, but also a better understanding of where search should go: integration."


Sullivan's take was different. "Google and Yahoo already have concerns about each other. Google is more concerned about Yahoo, Yahoo is more concerned about Google. Microsoft is just another competitor. It needs a ton of work to compete with Google or Yahoo, but Microsoft knows that."


Li is bullish on Microsoft's search efforts because of the company's plans to better integrate Web search with search tools for sifting through hard drives, whether on an individual's PC or an enterprise's network. Although much of the talk about such a blend has revolved around its inclusion in Longhorn, the next generation of Windows, Li said to watch for it long before that OS's release in 2007.


"I just don't think they can wait that long," she said. Look for the first evidence of blended search tools by the end of this year or the beginning of next, she added.


Blending Internet and other data searches makes sense. "How many search boxes do you want to manage?" And Li said it's long overdue. "Why is it that you can quickly search through billions of Web pages, but you can't find an e-mail?"

[fcuknu]

the reason its so amazing because it does it INSTANTLY. If your not amazed by this... come on! Search your entire Hard drive in 1 second for 1 file, and it searches in EVERY (readable) file on the computer, it can find the word "doggie" in a pdf in under a second. If you have ever used Itunes or winamp, you know how you type the name of a song in, and it starts having some possible matches, until u stop typing, thats how it works, amazing technology imho. The keynote is online and you cna watch the video if you want

[Smoke]

the reason its so amazing because it does it INSTANTLY. If your not amazed by this... come on! Search your entire Hard drive in 1 second for 1 file, and it searches in EVERY (readable) file on the computer, it can find the word "doggie" in a pdf in under a second. If you have ever used Itunes or winamp, you know how you type the name of a song in, and it starts having some possible matches, until u stop typing, thats how it works, amazing technology imho. The keynote is online and you cna watch the video if you want

At what cost of performance? Keeping the entire MBR and file tables in RAM has to take up some space, and when I'm paying $200 on a video card for a few more fps I don't want a search function I'm not going to use on a daily basis bogging me down.

[fcuknu]

from what I understand, it dosent at all, but I dont have too much info at the time