which is better between Beagle, Google Desktop, and Spotlight?

[Rilindo Foster]

I like spotlight too, but for some reason, it's quite slow for me.   
However, being that I run Mac OS X on a macbook (with a 4200 RPM  
drive), I am not quite surprised.

Google Desktop is quite good, but I am not crazy with displaying the  
results in the browser. I rather have it display in a explorer-like  
window (albeit with some enchancements).

I have not tried Beagle. I'll poke around with and see how that works  
out.

On Jan 8, 2007, at 3:21 AM, James Gray wrote:

> Tshepang Lekhonkhobe wrote:
>> Hi,
>> (I asked this on debian-user without too many replies)
>> I hear good things about Spotlight and hardly ever used Google  
>> Desktop
>> and Beagle, so out of curiosity do wonder about how they compare with
>> each other in terms of memory usage, indexing speed, and breadth of
>> search.
>
> I've used both Beagle and Spotlight.  Spotlight is definitely  
> faster and more accurate (it returns more relevant results).  It's  
> a bit hard to compare though as the data sets on each of the  
> machines was different. Beagle is written in Mono, which IMHO kinda  
> sucks a bit.  I wonder if there would be much of a speed  
> improvement if it was written in something like C++ instead.  I've  
> certainly noticed speed improvements in code I've ported from .Net  
> (Mono) to C++.  But millage varied significantly depending on what  
> you're trying to do.
>
> One of the REALLY nice features of Spotlight is it's tight  
> integration with Apple Mail and other OSX components (which M$  
> extended even further by adding Spotlight hooks into M$-Office).   
> It's really nice to be able to find a single message from the  
> thousands in my mail box from typing in two words :)
>
> Beagle seemed to be a bit of resource hog while it was indexing  
> whereas (again - is this a failure of design, or a side-effect of  
> Mono??).  I haven't noticed a similar slow-down on OSX with  
> Spotlight.  Given that Spotlight was written "by Apple for Apple"  
> it consequently is bound to work a little more efficiently than an  
> universal search tool such as Beagle.
>
> Having said that though, Beagle is a very useful tool and well  
> worth the time and effort to set it up if you find yourself (like  
> me) wondering what header file had a particular declaration on and  
> couldn't be bothered opening each one until you found what you're  
> after!
>
>> Also watch out for Tracker (www.tracker-project.org) which might soon
>> rule over all of them.
>
> Indeed - it looks promising.  FWIW, Spotlight already supports a  
> lot of the data sources the tracker project hasn't implemented yet  
> (such as e-mail, projects, contacts etc...).  Still, it's certainly  
> a step in the right direction :)
>
> Cheers,
>
> James
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