The Spotlight search on Mac is horrible and constantly needs to be reindexed. Search on iOS is equally as terrible and frequently doesn't find apps installed on my phone if I search for them by name. And the iOS App Store search consistently is underwhelming. Why?
Spotlight is pretty awesome imo. I had problems on previous versions, but that was specific to a corrupt PDF. Stuff like spotlight comments enhances it further. I search something like 25k docs in various formats on my Mac in seconds.<p>Windows is far worse. They don't have a native PDF search facility (at least on Windows 7) and its sloooow.<p>iOS, I agree. It's gotten better, but the app search thing is bizarre -- especially since it works so well on Mac.
Not my experience at all.<p>I've never noticed my Spotlight indexing, except for when I've upgraded the OS. Items also come up very easily for me. I mostly use it to launch apps and it finds those for me with very few keystrokes. Maybe 1-2 gets me to the apps I use the most. For documents, it works well for me too, but not as good as the apps.<p>You can always try <a href="https://www.alfredapp.com/" rel="nofollow">https://www.alfredapp.com/</a>, but even in their blog they admit that with Yosemite kinda changed the game for them.
I'll chime in with another "this is not my experience at all".<p>I use Spotlight religiously for the very reason that it's lightning fast for me. I've never had it index anything for me where it interrupted me even with multiple HDDs plugged into the Mac. Most of the time it only indexes after OS upgrades and I usually do those at night when it's not business critical. Same with iOS. I've never had issues.<p>Have you tried manually removing the index and then re-enabling it?
They don't have server-side "DNA", unlike Google and Facebook. The executive management were not competent to hire competent server-side people, basically. They are getting there though...
Instead of the Finder or the Dock, I use Spotlight heavily. I should probably move to Alfred, but I'm too cheap. I only notice it reindex after some upgrades and maybe once or twice a year otherwise.<p>I also use iOS search a lot and haven't run into the problems you describe. The iOS App Store? I'm on the same page as you. It's totally frustrating and doesn't work right.
> Search on iOS is equally as terrible and frequently doesn't find apps installed on my phone if I search for them by name.<p>I have never had this problem, not even once. I love the iOS spotlight search.
iOS apps are difficult to index because apps lack searchable metadata. Searching for "espn" or "fantasy" while looking for the "ESPN Fantasy Football" app will provide no results because the official name of the app is 'Football.' The app name (also disjoint from App Store name) is really the only out-of-the-box search indexable string
What you have to understand is that Apple is a company that is really bad at almost everything, except for the one or two products that Jobs or Ive are focusing on. (OK maybe their supply chain too, that is said to be Cook's strength.) But they are so good at those one or two things (the iPhone, basically), that people are willing to overlook all the bad things.