Leopard’s beefier Spotlight may reconfigure Tiger indexes
October 25th, 2007
By Jason D. O'Grady & David Morgenstern

Apple’s search technology Spotlight is getting a serious makeover in Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard: speedier performance, a greater reach for its searches and an overall improvement in its usability.

However, the new version appears to use a different format for its indexing and some folks qualifying Leopard report trouble when dual-booting into Tiger. Yesterday I spoke with a longtime reader who’s a Mac IT director. He is qualifying Leopard client and testing Leopard from an external FireWire drive connected to an Intel Mac.

He boots between the external Leopard system and his internal Tiger setup. He said that Leopard appears to be overwriting either a preference or the index on the Tiger volume. When he reboots back into Tiger, Spotlight starts churning the machine to recreate the index. It also wipes out the preferences, he said.

"When I rebooted back into Tiger from the internal drive (to get my actual work done), all my Spotlight prefs were reset and mdimport began working. I went back to Leopard and added my internal HD to the Privacy list, then went back to Tiger, where Spotlight again began rebuilding the database," he said.

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Hmm, sounds like the search feature integrated with Vista, but anyone want to bet that no one files a lawsuit against Apple for a lack of users to change their default system search engine...