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Comment by nijiko | Hacker News Reader

power users just hit it and go.

Power users use Alfred or LaunchBar (or Quicksilver, IIRC that project was resurrected).

No power user ever uses spotlight to launch apps? Those are some awe-inspiring mental gymnastics you're doing to take Apple's side here.

A flippant response to a flippant response. But thanks for the hyperbole there.

Really, this thread just looks like a bunch of paranoid conspiracy nuts, thinking Apple is out to steal your searches. I get it, privacy is important. I don't disagree. But you're* acting like they installed a keylogger on your computer (in point of fact, someone on IRC accused Apple of making "something that sends all of their local query keystrokes to Apple", which is a pure fabrication).

* that's the plural "you", not you personally

You see it as conspiracy nuts, but I just see a bunch of people complaining that it's not explained well enough. I see no comment on motivation at all.

By the way, there's a perfectly good English word that means "plural you minus you personally," which is "they."

My argument is that it is explained well enough, but most people complaining in here haven't even looked at the feature beyond seeing the original article talking about how to disable it with scripting. For example, as near as I can tell, eropple doesn't use Spotlight for anything except as a quick app launcher, which is a usage that doesn't involve Spotlight Suggestions (and AFAICT doesn't even try to send any queries to Apple). And yet he's been extremely argumentative, making wild assumptions about what's going on and then publicly complaining about it. Anyone who doesn't even look at the feature hardly has any grounds to complain about what it does and doesn't do, since they don't even know what it does or doesn't do. And their lack of knowledge is entirely their fault.

> By the way, there's a perfectly good English word that means "plural you minus you personally," which is "they."

If I was talking to you personally, one-on-one, I'd use "they". I used "you" because I was speaking to the larger audience of the people involved in this thread.

How does the new Spotlight know whether or not you're using it as a quick app launcher without communicating back to the mothership? I would have thought that it would send every query and then display the result or not depending on what comes back. I don't see how you could reasonably do it otherwise, unless you want to block internet searches for any term that matches an app name.

From using it, when you start typing, it immediately shows the top local hit, but it doesn't expand to show results until you've stopped typing for a noticeable period of time. Note that if you type a long query slowly, you'll never see results, even though you've been typing for a while.

Based on the consistency of the delay, I assumed it was doing the quick local search for the top hit, and then deferring the more expensive searches (including internet-enabled searches) until it's decided that it's time to show the results window. So I tested it, sniffing http traffic, and while I didn't pinpoint which particular queries are sent by Spotlight, there was reliably a burst of HTTP traffic right before the results window was shown every time, and no noticeable HTTP traffic before then. This suggests that my assumption is correct, that it's not doing the internet-enabled search until it believes that the user is done typing.

Based on this, if you type your search and hit return immediately, then it won't have sent your query anywhere.

I don't even care, personally, what their motivation is. I care that they didn't ask before jamming it in there. I trusted Apple to not do invasive things as opt-in, I don't now.

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