The Swiss Army knife has fallen victim to unintended consequences. Once the dream of every schoolboy and pocketed by anyone who went out into the countryside, my small collection of Swiss Army knives and multi-tools now remains indoors and unused. This is the result of strict laws on the carriage of knives in the UK; although not deemed illegal, since 1988 carrying them in a public place has put you at risk of being stopped and searched, and one friend was subjected to that for carrying a mere paint-scraper.

Swiss Army knives have another more sinister danger, that they’re used in preference to dedicated tools. Over the last week or two as I’ve been digging deeper into Spotlight, I can’t help but think how it has turned into the Swiss Army knife of search tools, by compromising its powers for the sake of versatility.

At present, I know of four different Spotlights:

• Global Spotlight, incorporating local, web, and some in-app search, accessed through the Spotlight tool in the menu bar;
• Local Spotlight, restricted to searching files in local and some network storage, typically through a Find window in the Finder;
• Core Spotlight, providing search features within an app, commonly in the contents of an app’s database;
• Third-Party Local Spotlight, a more limited local search available to third-party apps.

Of those, it’s Global Spotlight that I find most concerning, as it’s the frontline search tool for many if not most who use Macs, and the most flawed of the four. It’s not even the fault of Spotlight, whose 20th birthday we should have celebrated just over a month ago. No, this flaw goes right back to Sherlock, first released in Mac OS 8.5 in 1998.

At that time, few Macs had more than 5 GB of hard disk storage, and local search typically dealt with tens of thousands of files. That was also the first year that Google published its index, estimating that there were about 25 million web pages in all. Apple didn’t have its own web browser to offer, but made Microsoft’s Internet Explorer the default until Safari was released five years later. Merging local and web search into a single app seemed a good idea, and that’s the dangerous precedent set by Sherlock 27 years ago.

The result today only conflates and confuses.

In the days of Sherlock, web search was more a journey of discovery, where most search engines ranked pages naïvely according to the number of times the search term appeared on that page. That only changed with the arrival of Google’s patented PageRank algorithm at the end of the twentieth century, and placement of ads didn’t start in earnest until the start of the new millennium, by which time Safari was established as the standard browser in Mac OS X.

Local search was and remains a completely different discipline, with no concept of ranking. As local storage increased relentlessly in capacity, file metadata and contents became increasingly important to its success. Internally local searches have been specified by a logical language of predicates that are directly accessible to remarkably few users, and most of us have come to expect Spotlight’s indexing to handle metadata for us.

The end result challenges the user with negotiating web search engines and dodging their ads using one language, confounded by the behaviour of Siri Suggestions, and hazarding a wild guess as to what might come up in the metadata and content of files. More often than not, we end up with a potpourri that fails on all counts.

As an example, I entered the terms manet painting civil war into Spotlight’s Global Search box and was rewarded with a link to Manet’s painting of The Battle of the Kearsarge and the Alabama from 1864, as I’d hope. But entered into the search box of a Find window, those found anything but, from Plutarch’s Lives to a medical review on Type 2 diabetes. In MarsEdit’s Core Spotlight, though, they found every article I have written for this blog that featured the painting.

To get anything useful from local Spotlight, I had to know one of the ships was the USS Kearsarge, and that unusual word immediately found an image of the painting, but no useful content referring to it. Had I opted to search for the word Alabama instead, I would have been offered 94 hits, ranging from linguistics to the Mueller report into Russian interference in the 2016 US Presidential election. Adding the requirement that the file was an image narrowed the results down to the single image.

Conversely, entering Kearsarge into Global Spotlight offered a neighbourhood in North Conway, New Hampshire, in Maps, information about three different US warships from Siri Knowledge, Wikipedia’s comprehensive disambiguation page, a list of five US warships of that name, and three copies of the image of Manet’s painting without any further information about them.

Spotlight is also set to change with the inevitable addition of AI. Already suggestions are tailored using machine learning, but as far as I’m aware local Spotlight doesn’t yet use any form of AI-enhanced search. Words entered into search boxes and bars aren’t subject to autocorrection, and although Global Spotlight may suggest alternative searches using similar words, if you enter acotyle Spotlight doesn’t dismiss it as a mistake for acolyte. It remains to be seen whether and when local Spotlight switches from Boolean binaries to fuzziness and probability, but at least that will be more akin to the ranking of web pages, and we’ll no longer need to be bilingual.

For the time being, we’re left with a Swiss Army knife, ideal for finding where Apple has hidden Keychain Access, but disappointing when you don’t know exactly what you’re looking for.