Apple Spotlight patent predates Microsoft’s Longhorn announcement by three years

’Popular wisdom’ (itself an oxymoron…) has it that Apple’s upcoming Spotlight search technology copies Microsoft’s plans for desktop search in the delayed Longhorn operating system. However, evidence from a patent granted January 25, 2000 shows that Apple had several years’ worth of head start on Microsoft regarding universal desktop search.

Patent 6,847,959 specifies a claim for a “Universal interface for retrieval of information in a computer system.” Filed January 5, 2000, Apple was officially granted the patent on January 25, 2005. Not terribly speedy on turnaround time at the patent office, are they? :)

I’ll spare you the legal mumbo-jumbo of the patent language; suffice it to say, the goal of Spotlight is to enable you to find anything on your Mac from a search interface embedded in the operating system itself. Instead of separate search mechanisms inside of each application, Spotlight integrates search functionality across programs and file system both. It purports to be a revolutionary new paradigm for desktop search, and I have every expectation that it will deliver exactly that. Tiger? Q2? On a nice new Powerbook G5? Ohhhh, ‘twould be pure, unadulterated bliss.