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GNOME GUI Software Linux

Preview Of New Beagle Search UI 36

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the i-still-run-a-desktop-search-in-my-head dept.
An anonymous reader writes "The new Beagle Search UI was merged into Beagle CVS last week, after being developed as a separate module known as 'Holmes'. A preview is now online with plenty of screenshots. It currently doesn't look as smooth or well integrated as Spotlight, but it does look promising and it is still in a very early stage."
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Preview Of New Beagle Search UI More

Preview Of New Beagle Search UI

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  • Another step forward (Score:1, Informative)

    by helmutvs ( 912204 )
    This looks like another (needed) step towards making Linux ready for the average computer user.

  • Eyecandy (Score:1, Redundant)

    by Eightyford ( 893696 )
    Eyecandy, that is not.

    • A number of comments on the page linked claimed that the screen shots are ugly, with bad fonts etc. To me, they look fine - antialiased and the whole thing is a lot nicer than any Windows XP screen I've seen. It's clean and doesn't distract me.

      Do people really think this is ugly? Why?

  • if it has web-search features will it give Slashdot servers a problem loading thousands of pages like Google Desktop does?

  • the spotlight interface is horrible (Score:3, Informative)

    by John Nowak ( 872479 ) on Wednesday January 18, 2006 @04:46PM (#14504231)
    Anything should be better. I'm not going to get into details here, but if anyone has actually used it, they'll know how limited and clunky it is. John Siracusa outlined the issues well in the Ars write-up on Tiger. [arstechnica.com]
    • the spotlight interface is horrible

      Agreed, in the same vein as "all OS's suck, just that 'x' sucks less". Taken in the context of all available desktop search systems, Spotlight is pretty good.

      Anything should be better.

      I wouldn't bet on it. It's a really hard thing to get right. We're currently at the bear-skins and stone tools stage of full desktop search. Elegance in design takes time.

      John Siracusa outlined the issues well

      No he didn't. He critiqued Spotlight well. There's a huge difference. A Beagle devel
    • Wow, apparently I'm not "anyone" because I find it great. In fact when I first used it I thought, "anyone who doesn't like this must be a effeminate moron!". So you're an effeminate moron? *scans posting history* Yep.

  • Interesting... (Score:5, Informative)

    by mellon ( 7048 ) * on Wednesday January 18, 2006 @05:36PM (#14504689) Homepage
    I'm working on a somewhat more flexible search tool [sourceforge.net] for Qt/KDE right now. I'll put up some screenshots in a few minutes - I'd be interested in some insightful comments about it.
    • Screenshots are up. I realized after posting it that the above comment sounds like stealing thunder from Beagle - sorry about that. The Beagle stuff looks cool; my reason for putting this comment up was (a) to show that there is more that can be done with a search UI than merely what spotlight does, and (b) because the small subset of searchers who need the additional functionality provided in gofer and not beagle might see this and try it out or comment on it.
      • You're not using indexing? That is kinda the selling point of Spotlight, Beagle, Google Desktop, etc.

        (or rather, the selling point is that the speed of searching is so fast that it's actually useful as a way of navigating your files)

        • Re:Interesting... (Score:3, Informative)

          by mellon ( 7048 ) *
          Excessive reliance on indexing renders searching virtually useless. If you want to use searching to keep track of your files, you need to search quickly. Generally speaking, an indexed search will either find too many matches, or too few, because you can't do intelligent string matching with an indexed search - you can only search for indexed words, and of necessity the index can't store word relationships.

          For example, and index will have a pointer in it that says "acrobatic" occurs in files a, b, c, d,
          • I've never used spotlight, and beagle only very little, but I've had extremely good results with google desktop. My primary use is searching pdf-files (whenever I want to save a web page I print it with pdfcreator). I can't really recognise the problems you're describing.
            • I suspect Google does something a bit smarter than the naive indexing scheme I'm talking about. They've historically been very smart about searching. You'll get a better idea of why Google doesn't do well, though, if you try to find something relatively obscure on Google for which all the keywords you can think of are common. Google may return ten thousand matches, and the one you need could be anywhere on the list. If you have a relatively constrained source base, and you're searching for things th
              • How long do your searches usually take, say if you let it search your entire home folder? Are we talking ms, s, minutes?
                • Hm. First of all, let me just be clear here in saying that I am not saying that indexing is bad, or that Beagle is bad, or that you should use my search engine instead of Beagle. I just tried a search of a ten gigabyte mail folder. It took eight minutes. This is on a modern laptop with a laptop drive, but still, that's 2.2 megabytes per second, which is pretty pathetic. I would hope to get a bit closer to the drive's native speed with some optimization, of which I have so far done none - not even
                  • I would hope to get a bit closer to the drive's native speed with some optimization

                    You'll never get particularly close to the drive's native speed like that. Hard drives (and the HD is gonna be your big bottleneck when you're searching more data than can fit in the block cache), are really, really, good at burst reads of lots of consecutive pieces of data. Your 10GB mail folder, which presumably has thousands of files in it, is probably spread all over the disk, even if individual files are pretty unfragmen
                  • What if you used the index to create a shorter list of candidate files? e.g. instead of looking at all 10 gigs of files for "acrobatic wombat", find the 30 or whatever files that contain "acrobatic" or "wombat" using the index and only do a full-text search of that? I guess it gets more complicated if you allow wildcards (something like "acrobat* wombat"), but I think it's worth thinking about...

          • For example, and index will have a pointer in it that says "acrobatic" occurs in files a, b, c, d, e and f. And the word "wombat" occurs in files c, e, k, l and m. So if you want to find the phrase "acrobatic wombat", which only occurs in file c, you're going to get either too long a list, or possibly no list at all.

            Oops, I edited my point away here. In the above example, the index would actually do admirably, because both acrobatic and wombat appear in the index, and the only file that contains both is f

  • Not As Well Integrated!? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by nathanh ( 1214 ) on Wednesday January 18, 2006 @05:38PM (#14504704) Homepage

    Is the submitter on crack? Beagle is equally or perhaps more integrated than Spotlight.

    To launch the Beagle search UI is a single keypress: F12. On Spotlight it's a double keystroke: command spacebar. Advantage: Beagle.

    Both Beagle and Spotlight have a single icon in the main panel that you can click for a search UI or to set preferences. Advantage: equal

    Both Beagle and Spotlight have a single search field that you can type into, hit enter, and see the results in the main window. Advantage: equal.

    Clicking on a search result in either Beagle or Spotlight will launch the appropriate application for that document. Advantage: equal.

    Beagle has helpers for mail, web pages, text documents, spreadsheets, image files, audio files, instant messaging, etc. Spotlight does not have the same breadth of helpers. Advantage: Beagle.

    Beagle is integrated with inotify which means it is aware of file changes as soon as they occur. The very latest versions of OS X can do the same thing for Spotlight. Advantage: equal.

    Beagle metadata is stored in the ext3 filesystem, associated with the file, so when you move the file the metadata moves with it. Beagle also provides a legacy database for filesystems that don't support file metadata. OS X does not provide a legacy database so you can't store metadata for files on filesystems such as found on removable drives. Advantage: Beagle.

    Neither Beagle nor Spotlight are integrated with any applications other than the Finder or the Finder equivalent. Some OS X applications give the illusion that they have Spotlight functionality by using the same magnifying glass icon. In fact, they are using a separate metadata database and their own search routines. Advantage: equal.

    Beagle looks ugly and Spotlight looks ugly. However Spotlight is the least ugly of the two though it fails a number of human interface design rules. Advantage: you decide.

    Spotlight has been rammed down everybody's throat when it's blindingly obvious that it was rushed for Tiger. Beagle is still an optional feature on most distros. Advantage: you decide.

    • To launch the Beagle search UI is a single keypress: F12. On Spotlight it's a double keystroke: command spacebar. Advantage: Beagle.

      That's a simplistic analysis. Since users will generally type in their search terms, their hands will be in the main section of the keyboard. That means that it is easier to press Cmd-Space than F12, since the former is located closer to where their hands are. In fact, it's easy to do with one thumb, since the two keys are next to one another. To hit F12 on most keyboards, you
    • OS X does not provide a legacy database so you can't store metadata for files on filesystems such as found on removable drives.

      Are you sure? Every time anyone with a Mac goes anywhere near a folder of mine on a PC network share or disk, it spatters folders called ".DS_Store" on them, and for many files it creates a file named "._filename ". Aren't these used for generic metadata storage? If not, what are they for?

  • If you use KDE and are looking for a desktop search application you should try Kat [mandriva.com]
  • I thought the "Beagle search" had already been completed. [slashdot.org]

    Really, how much more time does this issue need? :)
  • I wrote a series of articles [mikesalsbury.com] on my web site a little while ago comparing Red Hat Linux FC4 to Mac OS X 10.4. While OS X has the advantage in a number of areas, I believe Linux has it in several others. Spotlight is one of those tools Apple makes a big deal about, but which Linux and open source have replicated with relative ease. Beagle is one good example of this. Other search tools noted in the replies here are good as well. I was a Mac advocate until just before the release of Mac OS X. Apple lost

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