A patent granted to Apple January 25th, 2005 appears to reveal that Apple had a multiyear head start on Microsoft for Spotlight, the company's search technology that will be released later this year in Tiger. Many had seen Spotlight as a quickly developed, me-too technology intended to compete with Microsoft's long-delayed Longhorn update to Windows, but the patent application shows that Apple began working on the technology in January of 2000, years before Longhorn was announced.
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