In Praise of Spotlight

Search is a great thing when it works perfectly. Google's web search worked so good that most people stopped trying to remember web addresses and instead relied on being able to re-discover their favorite sites with a quick search. Desktop search on computers is nothing new, but for Windows users, it's got such a bad reputation that few would dare to touch it. Windows 7 stepped up the game with decent desktop search, but they were simply playing catchup to OS X at that point.

Because on a Mac, Spotlight search is good enough that you'll rarely have to ever manually hunt for a file or program. It's still not perfect, and most pro Mac users end up using other search and launcher tools like Alfred. I've finally started trying out Alfred this week, and love it so far, but it was Spotlight itself that originally made me realize how useful search could be.

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