desktop search

[Lord Sauron]

On 11/7/06, D. R. Evans <doc.evans at gmail.com> wrote:
> D. Michael McIntyre said the following at 11/07/2006 05:07 PM :
> > On Tuesday 07 November 2006 5:19 pm, D. R. Evans wrote:
> >> Is it just me, or does desktop search basically suck in Kubuntu?
> >
> > I think I feel old.  I have no idea what any of this thread is about.  I use
> > find, slocate and grep, in various combinations.
> >
>
> Basically, this thread is about being able to find something that you
> vaguely recall from a year ago, but it might be in a document, or an
> e-mail, or an IM, and you really can't remember much about it except that
> you know that it was a discussion about why cricket is more interesting
> than baseball.
>
> find and its buddies are not a lot of help for that sort of thing, since
> many of the formats of these files aren't ASCII. And the old tools can also
> be incredibly slow, since you have probably accumulated many gigabytes of
> data in the past year.

GB?  I collect about 100-200 MB of data each year, and a good 60-120
megs of that is in my browser cache.  It's mainly quirky things I've
downloaded.  I have a hard time imagining how someone can gather
gigabytes of *searchabe* (non-video/audio) content per year.

> It is amazing to me that it's not only faster to find stuff on the Internet
> than it is on my hard drive, but it's orders of magnitude faster.

Think of all those Google search servers, the big RAID arrays...

And also think: it's in Google's best interest if their search takes a
shorter time.  That way they can process more querys with fewer
servers, which is cheaper for them.  It wouldn't be economical to them
if every time you searched it monopolized a search server entirely for
a few minutes.

I don't find it amazing because, simply put, they've got so much more
firepower than all my computers combined it's really a wonder they're
not faster.  And I own 5 computers (I'm lucky and nerdy).

-- 
========== GCv3.12 ==========
GCS d-(++) s+: a? C++ UL+>++++ P+
L++ E--- W+(+++) N++ o? K? w--- O? M+
V? PS- PE+ Y-(--) PGP- t+++ 5? X R tv-- b+
                DI+++ D+ G e* h- !r !y
========= END GCv3.12 ========