Use the Source Luke

[Steven D'Aprano]

On Sat, 29 Jan 2011 19:59:33 -0800, rusi wrote:

> On Jan 30, 2:22 am, Ben Finney <ben+pyt... at benfinney.id.au> wrote:
>>
>> The “problem”, which I don't consider to be a problem per se, is one of
>> OS-wide policy, not “installers”. The policy is a matter of tradeoffs
>> across the system, and isn't “tucking the code away in a dark corner”.
> 
> Earlier mail:
> 
>> If you want to blame anything for this (though I think it’s inaccurate
>> to frame it as a problem), the correct target of your accusation is the
>> fact that a filesystem path is the identifier for these modules that
>> will be used by programs to find them.
> 
> I think this is a fairly accurate description of (one aspect of) the
> problem.
> If you dont see it as a problem how do you explain that google can
> search the World Wide Web better than we can search our individual hard
> disks?

I fail to see any connection between the location that operating systems 
store files, and the ability of Google to index publicly available 
websites. It sounds to me like the equivalent of "If you don't think 
Python programmers are a problem, how do you explain that it takes me 45 
minutes to drive to work in the morning but nearly an hour to drive home 
in the evening?"

Google has approximately one million servers indexing the web, and 
they're willing to use hundreds of terabytes of disk space to store the 
indexes. My desktop is *one* PC with little free space, and I'd rather 
trade off time for storage, so I don't keep any indexes of file content 
on my system. If I *wanted* to index my files, I could do so, although in 
fairness I'm not aware of any Linux tools which do this -- I know of 
`locate`, which indexes file *names* but not content, and `grep`, which 
searches file content but doesn't index what it finds.

On Windows and Mac, though, I believe there are standard utilities which 
will index file content if you allow them.

So... Google can search the web better than we can search our local hard 
drives because Google has invested tens or hundreds of millions into 
building a world-class search engine, and we haven't.


-- 
Steven