Mac Lab Report

A Big Oversight in Spotlight's Searches

- 2005.09.02

I have a great many files which my publisher requires to be named in a format like this: 3.2.4.thing.another. The Finder doesn't choke on this or cause any problems due to "." extensions, but Spotlight apparently cannot look for terms that begin with a number. To test this, I created several files on my desktop.

xylophone

xylophone.creosote

xylophone.creosote.prairie

xylophone.creosote.prairie.lingo

xylophone.creosote.prairie.lingo.1.2.3.4

1.xylophone.

and did spotlight searches. All of these terms were found except for the last one (as the picture below shows). Curious, I did a quick Google search on "spotlight fail" and came up with any number of articles on the topic, including a really excellent, well written article over at Macintouch (link below).

Failed Spotlight search

This article highlights several limitations in Spotlight technology. I think Apple should address these in a future revision, because if you can't trust your search program to actually find files that exist on your hard drive, what good is it? Certainly not good enough to spell the end of heirarchical file organization and the desktop metaphor as has recently been touted in the tech press.

At the very least, there ought to be a "deep search" function not dependent on the Spotlight index, perhaps limited to filenames if necessary.

Link: Tiger Review: Examining Spotlight, MacInTouch

Jeff Adkins is a science teacher who isn't afraid to state his preferences in computing platforms. In his classroom he has everything from a beige All-in-One to a a G4 XServe, and they all work together nicely. He calls himself the "poster child for technology integration" in the classroom. He was the 2006 Outstanding Educator of the Year for the California Computer Using Educators (CUE) organization. He also maintains a site for astronomy teachers at www.AstronomyTeacher.com.

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