[HN Gopher] Ask HN: Why is on-device search terrible?
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       Ask HN: Why is on-device search terrible?
        
       My search experience across a lot of products is, to put it
       bluntly, garbage. Apple Mail, Gmail App on Android, Finder search,
       Windows Explorer search, MacOs Spotlight... rarely find what I'm
       looking for.  Why is it so bad? Are indexes / Io ops really that
       expensive?
        
       Author : yonz
       Score  : 13 points
       Date   : 2023-01-19 20:59 UTC (2 hours ago)
        
       | MH15 wrote:
       | iOS spotlight used to work well- now there's a three second delay
       | at times while it fetches the internet-enabled features. All I
       | want is it to find my apps for me!
        
       | runjake wrote:
       | Data point: Spotlight and the Gmail app searches work great for
       | me. What issues are you seeing?
       | 
       | Have you tried rebuilding your Spotlight index?
       | https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201716
       | 
       | Have you tried rebuilding your Mail.app index?
       | https://support.apple.com/guide/mail/rebuild-mailboxes-mlhlp...
        
       | f1refly wrote:
       | Try `find / -iname " _foo_ " 2>/dev/null`, works every time. Also
       | can take quite some time.
        
         | bravetraveler wrote:
         | mlocate/plocate (for _locate_ and _updatedb_ ) are also nice
         | 
         | Even if the db is not up to date, it's likely faster to
         | update/search than rely on _find_
        
         | hellfish wrote:
         | fd takes less time, would recommend
        
         | Sohcahtoa82 wrote:
         | On Windows, the fastest way seems to use WizTree to scan the
         | whole hard drive (Takes only a couple seconds to scan an SSD,
         | and even my 2 TB spinning HD with >900,000 files takes less
         | than 15 seconds) and then search the results for the filename.
        
           | clockwork-dev wrote:
           | Haven't tried this one, thanks. There's also Everything [0]
           | which is usually my favorite search for Windows. Fast and
           | supports regex.
           | 
           | [0] https://www.voidtools.com/
        
             | rococode wrote:
             | Everything search is incredible, for me it serves nearly
             | instant searches for 15TB+ of data without any trouble. I
             | think the secret sauce is a background service which
             | continuously updates the file index.
             | 
             | I also like WinDirStat a lot for Windows file management,
             | which is not really for search but gives a great view of
             | disk usage.
        
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       (page generated 2023-01-19 23:02 UTC)