Comment 1 for bug 771513

Neither Zeitgeist or Tracker are "search tools". The first is a log of all your activities and the second is an RDF database. You can implement text searching on top of both of them.

For Unity we choose ZG for a few reasons - fx. simpler deployment and more controlled impact on the host system (filesystem crawling is a notoriously difficult problem on Linux and while the Tracker devs has done an awesome job at it it is still not unproblematic). Plus ZG lends itself very naturally to the design requirements of having temporal sorting and grouping of results.

Zeitgeist, by nature, only logs stuff you interact with. And for desktop file searching I think this is the right space to be searching. How often are you looking for something on your file system you don't know you have?

The problem as I see it is that ZG fails to log some things you might expect it to. But let's fix *that* instead of throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

Bonus note: The files lens does not use any privileged API or anything. Anyone who wants to can write a files lens backed by Tracker. And if this choice turns out to be popular and superior in every way I am sure that we'll evaluate it for replacing the current one.