mr_ripley: gnome-storage isn't a search tool, though. It's intended as an interface to the filesystem.

All I know about Spotlight is what's being publicly released, but it seems to be just a fancy search tool. gnome-storage is intended for integration into both applications and the desktop.

More importantly, it handles file access, too. It's a database-driven filesystem layer. Seems to me that Spotlight is the cheap one here.

GNOME Storage may not be as far along as Spotlight at this point, but it's much more ambitious, from what I can see. Dismissing it as a cheap knockoff, especially when neither is yet released and they both started around the same time, seems rather premature.

Not to mention that Microsoft has been promising essentially the same thing since NT4, and BeOS was using a database FS before OS X existed. A database interface to filesystem metadata is not a new idea by any stretch of the imagination. I simply mentioned the one that was most familar to me.