Apple's Sherlock Provides Customized Search

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September 01, 1998 (12:34 PM EDT)

By John Borland,

SAN FRANCISCO -- Apple interim CEO Steve Jobs demonstrated a new Macintosh operating system feature that may undermine search-engine sites.

Listen to Steve Jobs outline the future of the Macintosh operating system. runs 12:37

Hear Excerpts About:
• Sherlock, runs 1:42;
• Apple Finances, runs 1:32;
• Mac OS X, runs 1:11;
• MAC OS 8.5, runs 6:16;
• WebObjects, runs 1:40;
• Jobs defining a turnaround, runs 0:52.
(requires RealAudio player)

Jobs was speaking at the Seybold San Francisco/Publishing '98 Conference and Exposition here in San Francisco when he showed off Mac OS 8.5's new feature, called Sherlock, that transparently piggybacks on major search engines to create customized results pages for each search.

Users type a natural-language phrase and Sherlock queries the major Web search engines to return a relevancy-ranked set of results. Users can go directly to individual pages, bypassing search-engine portal pages altogether.

Sherlock can also search a user's hard drive by keyword or full document text.

"This is an example of how you will see Apple integrating the Internet into the operating system more and more over time," Jobs said.

Sherlock was one of several new OS features Jobs showed at the Seybold conference. He also displayed faster file-copy features, enhanced color-synchronization features, and extended scripting power. The Mac OS 8.5 will be available in October, Jobs said.

Also demonstrated were early features of OS X, the successor to Rhapsody and Mac OS. OS X will be out in the Fall of 1999, Jobs said.

Jobs spent much of his talk detailing how Apple's fortunes have changed dramatically since he appeared at the Seybold Seminar a year ago.

The company (company profile) has posted two consecutive quarters of profits, refocused its product line, and is slowly beginning to regain users. In July, Apple reported $101 million in quarterly profits, outstripping even optimistic analysts' predictions.

Macromedia CEO Rob Burgess described how his own company's Mac revenue has steadily increased. The San Francisco-based Web software developer said last year's decline in Mac market share had turned around for his company -- rising 14 percent quarter to quarter.

Jobs also said Apple was releasing its Web Objects 4.0 Applications server Tuesday.

Cupertino, Calif.-based Apple announced it is cutting prices on 14-inch G3 233-MHz PowerBook notebook computers, starting at $2,799. "We're going full blast to build 14-inch notebooks to catch up with demand," Jobs said. "We hope to do that in the next couple weeks."