Try this: Go to a site that has an RSS-feed, like this one. Hit the blue RSS icon in Safari 1.3 (if you are running OS X 10.4). You then get a feed page for the site, like this:
Make a bookmark for the feed by hitting Apple-D. Save it somewhere in your bookmark and close the page.
Now disconnect your computer from the net by pulling the ethernet cable or turning off Airport. Find the bookmark you just made.
Now, see: The page is still there, even if the Mac isn’t connected to the net.
Which means: The feeds you bookmark with RSS are stored on your computer somewhere (If you know where exactly they are, use the comments below to tell me!).
So why don’t the words on these pages show up in Spotlight searches?
Think about it: What if you cold make a smart folder that searched only the stored RSS feeds, and that searched for certain keywords you were looking for?
Say, you’re interested in the “Getting things done” concept by David Allen. If the stored RSS feeds were searchable with Spotlight and Smart folders, you could have searched for “Getting things done” or “GTD” or “David Allen”, and every time someone in your 10s (or hundreds or thousands) of RSS feeds mentioned these search words, the article would be visible in the Smart folder.
And with some folder actions, you could make the dock bounce, or maybe tell Growl to display a message when a new post your interested in comes in.
Macosxhints has an interesting post covering something similiar, about Spotlight not being able to search the Safari browser history. It also has another very good idea: Let Safari save the text of every webpage you surf during the day, and index it immediately in Spotlight. That way you could search for any word you browsed on the net that day, and wham! - reload that page with a click.
That index wouldn’t have to be big: It could just be all the words, and with a url connected to them. For most webpages, a couple of hundred words, taking almost no space on your harddrive.
So to my “Mac OS X 10.4.2 wish list”:
- Make Safari RSS feeds I subscribe to searchable in Finder
- Give them a special attribute so I can search in only this feeds, and not my whole disk
- Make Safari save the text of very web page I browse, let’s say the last 14 days
- Let me search this index in Spotlight
This is of course sent to Apple Mac OS X feedback.