Spotlight on Spotlight - Carol Smith Home Page

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In its current form, however, the Smart Folder feature has one significant drawback, as
revealed during the system performance evaluation. Users will still sometimes want to focus
their query on a single folder. The Smart Folder feature permits this; unfortunately, the
search will be executed only one layer deep within the specified folder; the contents of any
nested folders are not considered by the query.
<strong>Spotlight</strong>’s Smart Folder feature.
Again, only experience and experimentation will reveal this limitation to the user; the
interface provides no guidance, no manual is provided, and Apple’s Help application is silent
on the issue.
CONCLUSION
Multiple published reviews of the new Mac OS X 10.4 operating system (‘Tiger’) were
consulted for this system evaluation. These reviews are uniformly positive in their
assessment of <strong>Spotlight</strong>, and so the project was approached with considerable optimism.
Having encountered many serious issues with <strong>Spotlight</strong>’s retrieval model, I am now
somewhat apt to believe these reviews were primarily derived from promotional materials
supplied by Apple, and involved scant independent analysis.
Put succinctly, the <strong>Spotlight</strong> indexing architecture is impressive; the indexing process is
transparent, automatic, and tightly integrated with the operating system. Without the
companionship of an effective information retrieval model and search interface, however,
the full power and utility of the index remains inaccessible to the average user.