I played with Apple’s “Spotlight”:http://www.apple.com/macosx/features/spotlight/ quite a bit when I was prototyping the Creative Commons extension to it. Today I was trying to find something on my Windows machine and I started to pull up the Windows Search tool, planning to go get lunch and come back to see if it found what I wanted. Then I remembered that I’d installed “Google Desktop Search 2″:http://desktop.google.com/ recently and that it does more than just display a cool sidebar. Of course, it does too much more.
I wanted to find something by filename (my .emacs file, which I can never remember where it’s at on Win32). Searching Google Desktop was fast, but it returned *everything* on my system containing “emacs”. What I’d really like from Google Desktop is something that seems pretty natural to me (and apparently Apple’s engineers, too) — the ability to search on a particular attribute. So is this really a missing feature, or have I just missed some super secret search syntax?