System Wide Desktop Search?

[raid517]

Hi it has long been a bugbear of mine (as a KDE user of 4 years 
duration) that the one thing that has always been missing from 
Konqueror/KDE has been any kind of decent modern file searching 
facility. Kfind has always only ever provided often very poor and 
painfully slow search capabilities.

However there has been much talk in recent years about operating systems 
incorporating desktop search capabilities directly into their 
infrastructures - the most notable among these being Apple's spotlight 
and Microsoft's WinFS (when it finally emerges) and also Gnome's Beagle. 
Regrettably however there has been little movement at all on the KDE 
front in this regard.

My wish for KDE is to see true desktop search functionality embedded 
directly into the core of Konqueror - in a similar way to the way Apple 
plan to make Spotlight a core component of their finder.

After all, Konqueror already provides a great basis for such advanced 
functionality. It has very powerful previewing features and can handle a 
vast array of file types, both local and remote.

My proposal is that kfind should in due course be considered obsolete in 
it's current form and should be replaced by exactly this kind of system 
wide desktop search support - preferably through direct intergration 
with Konqueror rather than through a third party application.

I have tried various third party search facilities, including KAT and 
Gnome's Beagle - and I have even somewhat bizzarly been reduced to 
attempting to install Yahoo and Google desktop search engines through 
crossover wine, exactly because searching in KDE is currently so poor.

But even while using these third party applications (which often only 
barely work in any case), one is left with the impression of trying to 
shoehorn functionality into KDE which should already be there natively 
anyway.
 
This is important for a number of reasons. First this is the direction 
in which the kernel is going, so clearly the kernel developers feel that 
Inotify is the future. Second it allows for a degree of standardisation 
across platforms and (even potentially) across Window managers around a 
single search methodology - in a similar way that most distributions are 
moving towards adopting udev and hotplug as a single standard for 
hardware recognition and driver detection - and thirdly, it allows the 
Linux community - and in this case specifically KDE to compete openly on 
a level playing field with the best that MS and Apple (in the form of 
WinFS and Spotlight) are able to produce.

I would very much welcome others opinions on this.

Best regards,

GJ