Why has sherlock failed as a tool?

[mi5moav]

I love sherlock, I think it was one of apple's greatest parts of it's operating systems. However, the problem is that it is not very well integrated into the system. If it was part of the file menu structure under the apple menu as a separate submenu like sherlock search... or better yet if we had a little hat icon in the menu bar. Sherlock could really have been something. The problem I see is that most people can't multitask or do it very efficiently and if you are surfing the net you focus on the main screen. Many times I've been running safari and need to search for something with google and do I use the google bar integrated into safari... no, as dumb as a dodo i type in google into the address bar to load the google page. Then again I think sherlock was also created as stop gap measure before safari came around. I remember a few years back that I wanted to check out movie info and I had to load that slow as mud internet explorer than wait 5 minutes. Sherlock was a breath of fresh air it loaded faster than ie and got my info in a fraction of the time. Even today if I wanted to get movie or flight info and I wanted to do it in the most efficient manner I would use sherlock, but heck no I use safari, dumb ass me... oh, well. This probably also goes back to the fact that we use things we are most familiar with and at this point its safari, and we don't like to stray from what we are most comfortable with and what's right in front of our faces. Just like the billions of pc users that will never switch because they are comfortable and familiar with windows 95. So, why does Apple keeps supporting sherlock and why have they not put any new channels in there or released and SDK. Of course you have watson running that show... but sherlock could be reborn.

[cfleck]

imho...

its too slow
the content provided by switchboard sucks
oh, and its too slow

[jego]

yea, too slow, much too slow.

i sometimes still use it for translation, but thats it.

its just too slow.

[RacerX]

Originally Posted by mi5moav

Then again I think sherlock was also created as stop gap measure before safari came around. I remember a few years back that I wanted to check out movie info and I had to load that slow as mud internet explorer than wait 5 minutes. Sherlock was a breath of fresh air it loaded faster than ie and got my info in a fraction of the time.

A bit of history on this subject...

Watson came out long before Apple redesigns Sherlock for 10.2. In fact Apple gave Watson the Apple Design Award for Most Innovative Mac OS X Product for 2002... and then basically stoled the idea for Sherlock.

Here is the problem, Watson is Cocoa... Sherlock is Carbon.

This makes Sherlock incredibly slow compared to Watson and exceptionally hard to write for for people out side of Apple. Watson comes with 20 tools and many people have written their own.

When Apple hijacked Watson's idea, many people thought that this was going to either be the end of Watson or that Watson would go over to the Windows side. Fortunately Apple made an inferior product and fumbled on the development.

I use Watson constantly. Both for TV and Movie listings, for weather, for ebay (I haven't search ebay via a browser in over a year), and tracking packages. And I just sold one of my clients with a ton of kids on Watson with the references tool.

It is sad that a third party developer is using Apple's own APIs better than Apple, but it is also nice to see a small developer keep Apple at bay when it tried to crowd in on the action.

And sure, Sherlock is free with Mac OS X... but with Watson you get what you paid for. I bought my license back in 2001 and have been using it happily ever since.

[twister]

I like the map features in sherlock & ebay but that's about it. It is slow at times and does seem to be on it's way out. Safari has the google bar, iTunes has movie trailers, and watson is quicker. It's just a matter of time. But i'm GLAD they removed sherlock from the find function in the OS.

[mi5moav]

I guess what I'm really trying to get with google coming out with its own search app soon for the desktop and longhorn supposedly having better search capabilities will the masses actually use an alternative search app. If watson never came around and sherlock was faster than watson is now and had even more channels would the masses use that or would they continue to use their browsers? It's as if we had a bike and a car in our garage. 99% of the people would use the car everytime for driving 50 miles to a store or going a block to see a neighbor. This isn't like what is the right tool for the job. The better tool for eating soup is a spoon many use a fork, but the quickest and most effecient is just picking the bowl up a slurping it down. What is more effcient something that gets the job done quicker or cheaper. If I am going to cut down one branch I'm not going to pull out my husq chain saw, I'll grap my 30 year old hacksaw though I know the chainsaw could cut it down in half the time. But if I had 30 limbs to cut i'll probably pull out the saw... and if I had 200 trees to cut I would call up a bunch of lumberjacks. So, I guess is there such thing as the perfect tool. There is no perfect way to kill a man, no perfect way to cut a tree, no perfect way to do anything and that is probably why if someone can make a penny off of a nuculear powered lawn mower then someones going to use it.

[MacMuppet]

I too go to a Google page and search there rather than use the Google window in the Safari title bar - but this is because I instist in google.co.uk rather than google.com.
I think its a matter of necessity as to whats stood the test of time.
Sherlock I found quite useful in OS 9 for searching one's own computer, but with the increased performance of OS X I find Apple+F perfectly fine for searching my machine now.
However with all the new plug-ins for Sherlock (actualy I don't know quite how new some of them are) I'm finding sherlock quite a useful tool for the web for very specific tasks - mainly when shopping online. If I'm looking for a website Sherlock would never occur to me (to the point that I don't even know if you can do this) but even Google is deeply frustrating when you are tyrying to find a specific product online.
For instance my Plug-ins include: UK Video, UK Books, UK Music, UK Games, UK Computers and iCalShare. Now to be honest I've only really used the Books, Games and iCalShare with any regularity, but they are truly brilliant.
If I was searching for say a game on Google, I'd get pages and pages of obscure game selling websites, based all over the world (even if I'd specified 'search within the UK') and those infuriating 'Kelkoo' and 'Dealtime' results which are never any use or really that related to yoyr search.
The UK Games plug-in will give me everyone who is currently selling it online, its availability - and, crucially, a complete listing of everyone prices for easy comparison - for instance it would never have occurred to me to go to Tesco Online to buy a DVD, but their prices are often really good.
I've been waiting some time for a particular book to come out in Paperback - Sherlock gives me all of the above and the format (hardback or otherwise) - information I'd have trouble getting from a web-browser without some pretty exhaustive searching.
The flights function is very impressive, but other than for shopping its the only thing I'll conceivably ever use Sherlock for. As mentioned by others, the speed of it in general means google all the way for general web searches....

[RacerX]

Originally Posted by mi5moav

I guess what I'm really trying to get with google coming out with its own search app soon for the desktop and longhorn supposedly having better search capabilities will the masses actually use an alternative search app.

Search app? I wouldn't call Watson a search app. If I need to do a search I have a ton of them set up right in my OmniWeb address field right now. If I type "g" and them the search terms I get a google search, "gn" and I get a google news search, "y" and I get a yahoo search and so on.

What is sad is that because you have not seen what Watson is able to do you are under estimating what Sherlock could have been. Sherlock isn't a failure because people don't need another search tool... it is a failure because people only think of it as a search tool.

Watson is designed to present information in a way that makes it easier to work with than it would be in a browser. Presentation is the key, not the ability to search.

No Google search app is going to be like Watson. Maybe like the Google search tool in Watson, but not like Watson.

If watson never came around and sherlock was faster than watson is now and had even more channels would the masses use that or would they continue to use their browsers?

That is an odd question... If Watson had never come around, Sherlock would look the same as it did in Mac OS X 10.0/10.1.

And Watson is not a browser replacement. It was designed to do what a browser couldn't, apply a GUI to information beyond what HTML and CSS could do. It is a platform for turning services on the web into an application on your system. Not all web content needs or should have that done to it, but some desperately needs it.

I would highly suggest getting past the mind set that Apple came up with this first. You should learn about Watson and why people use it. Because in this area Sherlock is to Watson what Windows is to Macintosh... a poor substitute.

Keep in mind, Sherlock 1 and 2 were search helpers, Watson and the new Sherlock to a point are web services applications. There is a major difference. If you are only using them as search tools... you haven't begin to use them yet.

For those of you who have forgotten what Sherlock looked like before... here it is in Mac OS X DP4.