I believe Spotlight has a full text search, which is a pretty major improvement, at of course a considerable price. Feels like a reasonable choice for My Novel/ and not a sane choice for Movie Downloads/ (unless maybe Spotlight can read subtitles???)
Also, an actual email client can specialise. BeFS is very general, the attributes can be typed but there's only one string type (other types include 32-bit and 64-bit integers, floats) so a Subject and a Sender email address both get indexed the same way. An email client might reasonably optimise for @corp.example type address searches for example, but then also do some simple keyword optimisations for subject line too.
You could not turn off indexing for some/ all folders in BeOS only for an entire filesystem (and if you do a bunch of stuff doesn't work)
Also, an actual email client can specialise. BeFS is very general, the attributes can be typed but there's only one string type (other types include 32-bit and 64-bit integers, floats) so a Subject and a Sender email address both get indexed the same way. An email client might reasonably optimise for @corp.example type address searches for example, but then also do some simple keyword optimisations for subject line too.
You could not turn off indexing for some/ all folders in BeOS only for an entire filesystem (and if you do a bunch of stuff doesn't work)