Dominic designed HFS+. Previously he designed BeFS. He's currently working on Finder.
Pavel wrote most of the BeOS Tracker (equivalent to Finder/Explorer). He's currently working on Finder.
While Spotlight and the related features may not be as powerful as Tracker/BeFS, it will certainly be more user friendly. I prefer the Power Myself, so hopefully 3rd Party Developers develop a Power-Users Solution. A way to modify the Types of Attributes for each filetype, so users can make custom Filetypes like we used to do in BeOS. That way, you could add things like "WordCount" to Word Documents, "Artist" and "Writer" to PNG Images (for Web Comics) and create a custom folder type "Album".
And it's true, BeOS had this same type of search a long long time ago. This is nothing new, and neither is Konfabulator. Apple's implementation of Spotlight is all completely automatic and will go out and index all your pdf files so you can search for text within the PDF file. Same goes for text documents such as word docs.
The search is a huge index file which is automatically updated. Guess what, Google has a huge index database of millions, or maybe billions of web pages.
And Firefox copied the Google search box in the top right of the browser. It's in the same spot and it looks almost the same ::ha::
That way, you could add things like "WordCount" to Word Documents, "Artist" and "Writer" to PNG Images (for Web Comics) and create a custom folder type "Album".