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What does apple have against marmalade?
Authored by: geohar on May 03, '05 03:59:34PM

Interesting experiments with Spotlight:

It works for command-line generated files (eg via vi too, provided you use a .txt extension). For some reason unknown to me, there are certain words which Spotlight will not index!!

By way of experimentation, I tried typing / cut and pasted in a recipie. Don't ask why, but if I add the word marmalade into the document and search for it, I get no hits. Marmite and esperanto, goulash all are ok. Random junkwords also seem fine.

This makes me wonder if the index internally lists word-numbers from some dynamic dictionary and for some reason marmalade has fallen through the cracks. Of course iMarmalade ;), marm, marma, marmal, marmala and marmalad are all fine (as in you can search for that word if only that prefix is in the document, not the full word).

BTW. This occurs whether you use vi, bbedit or textedit, regardless of what you use to open or save the document.

iTunes songs with marmalade in them are fine (can be the comment, doesn't have to be the track name).

Anyone got more words for the list?



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What does apple have against marmalade?
Authored by: gschueler on May 03, '05 04:24:41PM

searching for 'marmalade' after putting that into a text file works for me...



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What does apple have against marmalade?
Authored by: geohar on May 03, '05 04:40:09PM

What did you call the file? I named it something unrelated, and can see it using other search terms, but not marmalade. Totally repeatable with new files.

Very odd. BTW. I'm in a UK locale, rather than US - don't know if that matters.



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What does apple have against marmalade?
Authored by: andreas999 on May 04, '05 02:28:55AM

With a Swedish locale, no problem with either finding marmalade in old documents (pre-Tiger) or in new (post-Tiger).



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What does apple have against marmalade?
Authored by: geohar on May 04, '05 03:12:02AM

Ah. This morning it started working!

It turns out that spotlight looks at the update rate for a file and doesn't keep indexing it if it keeps being written too lots of times. Not sure how many or how frequently it takes before spotlight backs off.

Very interesting. Probably a good optimization from apple.



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