SpectateSwamp:This ShowDown thing is poorly thought out. Files the size of 800 years of my outmail. What individual in their right mind has that much data.
What your'e saying is that because you're the God of Search, it is utterly impossible for any of the other 6 billion people in this world to ever possibly have more data than you. And because it's "impossible" you see no point in dealing with it.
Get it through that mile-thick skull of yours that you are NOT the center of the universe. Because you can't conceive of it doesn't mean it's not possible. Quite the contrary, it is VERY possible, and very frequently occurs too. Just because you only have X megabytes of email doesn't mean someone else can't have X*100 megabytes, or more. You are NOT the authority on what's "too big" or "too small" or "just right".
SpectateSwamp: Showing what search can do, rather than making up some set of criteria that would never exist in the real world. Ever.
Again, you seem to think you're the center of the universe and have the right to define what's possible and what's not possible. Your "real world" might be accurate for everyone's Aunt who merely emails a few recipes back and forth. The rest of us use email for than that, and WILL have more than 3 of 4 recipes or family photos in our in-/out-boxes.
People have more than a couple hundred megabytes of data. And guess what, it won't be all emails. People use their computers for more than posting bad videos (really, a 60+ set of town council meetings on Youtube that no one is watching? c'mon...) and filling up forums with moronic blather.
But since you seem to hold email as the gold standard, how about my in-box? I have 649 megabytes of email stuff in my Thunderbird folders (and all of it plain text, before you go whining about that, too). No, I can't get rid of it. Most of it is work related. Orders from my boss, requests from clients, a few jokes from friends I keep around. I might not read all of it, I might not even want all of it, but I have to keep it, as it is a RECORD OF MY WORK.
Maybe in your small pathetic corner of the world you can get away with keeping a couple small email files and deleting the rest of it, but you know what? Yet again, you are not the center of the universe, and your way is NOT the way other people do things.
SpectateSwamp: Written by somebody who took the program for a spin and had no idea what was really going on.
You seem to think that SSDS allows people to know what's going on. You claim that other desktop searches are bad because they use index and "hide" information from people. Well, do you know what's going on in your computer? Do you know how you pressing on the enter key to get your next search result actually works? Do you know how the computer can retreive your data from the harddrive? Do you know how the data is physically stored? Do you know WHERE the data is physically stored? Do you know anything about harddrive technology? How about processors? What are the exact instructions for the CPU to do whatever it has to do to find your search terms?
Is SSDS using 'cmp' instructions in a loop? Perhaps VB is compiling your actual search code to use Boyer-Moore matching? Maybe it's using 'repz cmpsb' instructions? For that matter, do you know how Visual Basic is taking your code and compiling it into that search.exe you're so infatuated with? How about the linker? Must be some magic going on there... but you know everything, so you MUST know all the details of how everything happens.
What? You say you don't know? Oh my... how horrible. Your computer is hiding information from you...
Therefore by YOUR OWN RULES, since you don't know what's going on, you shouldn't be using SSDS. It hides too much detail from you.