BTW Android tried the whole unified search thing. Back in the days of hardware buttons there was even one of the four dedicated to just search. A running app could detect the button press and bring up a standardized search interface. If the search started outside an app (eg home screen) then you get the same standard search interface.
Each app could register as a search provider - responding with content relevant to the app itself. The search system would aggregate the content from search providers. If there were multiples then it would even track the historic popularity of each provider in order to prioritise the results. (For example there are providers for your music, contacts, text messages, google search, mint etc)
Note how it starts out saying it is a core feature. So core that the search button no longer exists with software buttons, although to be fair search can be shown in the action bar. And I never met a single Android user who actually used the search functionality! Many people did have a dedicated search widget on their device, but that was a Google search, rather than the phone search. The current Android 4.2 homescreen search puts google search results at the top of the screen and device search below which is mostly covered by the keyboard and requires additional clicks to see it all anyway.
This is a long winded way of saying that it seems to me that search turned out to be a dud on the platform by the king of search. I just tried search on my iOS device and it turned out to be very laggy, poorly performing and useless (eg clicking on an email search result opened the email app but not the relevant message!) This leads me to believe search isn't used much on iOS either!
As you say, in-app search does seem to work well across all platforms and apps. It looks like a system based generic search just fails to work on current generations of hardware, operating systems and user interfaces.
This is a common misconception. Google removed it for about a week, until they found and implemented a workaround. For all practical purposes, the universal search works exactly the same. I just tried it out on my Galaxy Nexus running Android 4.2.
Posting this from my Android tablet, it has no unified search for many months since it was updated after the lawsuit. Original Samsung galaxy tab 10.1 running the latest official Samsung 4.0 update.
So no, not a misconception. Many Android devices don't have it because of apple.
No, still a misconception. You're not running Android, you're running a version of Android adulterated by Samsung. The latest release of stock Android has unified search built in.
It's part of Google Now and I don't think it's bad at all. You just do the search, and then at the bottom of the screen you change from "Web" to "Tablet" and voila, results from tablet.
What is bad is the fact that Gmail doesn't support it. But it pulls up tweets, apps, chrome history, music, etc. Rather neat, in my opinion.
The old PalmOS also had a global find option. The OS would call every app that registered for this function and pass it the query. Problem was, this meant that having a single buggy app on your device would cause Find to crash for everyone. http://mobile.eric-poncet.com/palm/tutorial/find.html
I actually love that feature, allows me to find contacts and lesser used apps very quickly.
Btw.: On phones that have hardware buttons (but no dedicated search button, like the European version of SGS2) you can open search by long pressing the menu button on the home screen.
this (and the back button) is still one of my favorite features about Android.
i love that from home it will search google, while from play it will search apps, in gmail it will search mail and so on..
I am using Galaxy sII which still has a dedicated search button. just checked sIII and it is indeed gone! to me this is a major feature loss
Each app could register as a search provider - responding with content relevant to the app itself. The search system would aggregate the content from search providers. If there were multiples then it would even track the historic popularity of each provider in order to prioritise the results. (For example there are providers for your music, contacts, text messages, google search, mint etc)
There is a settings page where you can turn individual providers on and off. I added this functionality to the apps I developed. Here is the API/usage documentation: http://developer.android.com/guide/topics/search/index.html
Note how it starts out saying it is a core feature. So core that the search button no longer exists with software buttons, although to be fair search can be shown in the action bar. And I never met a single Android user who actually used the search functionality! Many people did have a dedicated search widget on their device, but that was a Google search, rather than the phone search. The current Android 4.2 homescreen search puts google search results at the top of the screen and device search below which is mostly covered by the keyboard and requires additional clicks to see it all anyway.
This is a long winded way of saying that it seems to me that search turned out to be a dud on the platform by the king of search. I just tried search on my iOS device and it turned out to be very laggy, poorly performing and useless (eg clicking on an email search result opened the email app but not the relevant message!) This leads me to believe search isn't used much on iOS either!
As you say, in-app search does seem to work well across all platforms and apps. It looks like a system based generic search just fails to work on current generations of hardware, operating systems and user interfaces.