One, Spotlight is just a search tool. They run a daemon in the background that monitors reads to the FS and updates an index [1]. In Haiku, indexing and querying is a feature built into the filesystem.
Secondly, Spotlight does full-text search and indexing whereas Haiku only indexes the attributes you attach to files.
Metadata plays a very important role in the Haiku world. You cannot fathom the extent of their power unless you use the OS. This is not a "feature" that was tacked onto the OS as an afterthought, the entire OS was built around this feature.
[1] I'm actually working on a tool like Spotlight for Haiku (http://code.google.com/p/haiku-beacon/), though development has been stalled since my PC went kaput.
One, Spotlight is just a search tool. They run a daemon in the background that monitors reads to the FS and updates an index [1]. In Haiku, indexing and querying is a feature built into the filesystem.
Secondly, Spotlight does full-text search and indexing whereas Haiku only indexes the attributes you attach to files.
Metadata plays a very important role in the Haiku world. You cannot fathom the extent of their power unless you use the OS. This is not a "feature" that was tacked onto the OS as an afterthought, the entire OS was built around this feature.
[1] I'm actually working on a tool like Spotlight for Haiku (http://code.google.com/p/haiku-beacon/), though development has been stalled since my PC went kaput.
EDIT: Read articles 24 and 25 for a sneak peek into BFS's more powerful features: http://www.birdhouse.org/beos/byte/