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A highly touted feature of Apple's new operating system, the Sherlock search engine, is clueless when it comes to searching the Web through some networks.
Sherlock replaces the old "Find" command in Apple's new MacOS 8.5, and can search local drives and the Web directly from the main interface. Sherlock queries several Web search engines simultaneously and then collates the results – the feature has been called the most interesting aspect of Apple's new OS.
Since its release last week, however, users have been discovering bugs in the system that disrupt the searching capabilities.
"It seems that Sherlock doesn't work correctly when trying to search through certain kinds of Web proxy servers – it just returns errors instead," said Mark Kriegsman, president of ClearWay Technologies, Inc., a Mac developer.
A proxy server acts as a liaison between machines inside a private network and the rest of the Internet, passing on user requests to the Net. Proxy servers are often used on corporate networks that are protected by a firewall, where outside access to the Internet is necessary, but incoming connections are not allowed.
Users have been reporting problems with Sherlock and proxy servers since the search engine's release on 17 October.
Apple recently posted a technical document describing how to use Sherlock with a proxy server, but the solution that the company outlines does not fix the bug.
The root of the problem, Kriegsman said, is that when Sherlock sends a search request to a Web search engine, the request has a "malformed"http header – a normal HTTP request would contain a From: line with the address of the search engine, but when used with a proxy server, Sherlock uses the address of the proxy server instead.
So instead of giving search results, it gives a dialog box with this message: "A network error occurred. There was a problem contacting one of the search sites you selected – please try again later."
As far as developers like Kriegsman can tell, not all proxy servers are affected by the bug. He did say that WebDoubler, a new proxy server that works on MacOS 8.5, is affected.
"It seems that there's some that it works with and some that it doesn't," Kriegsman said.
The reason for this, Kriegsman said, is that some proxies are more tolerant of Sherlock's bad HTTP requests. He said there are two solutions to the problem – either wait for Apple to come out with a fix, or find a patch for your proxy server that makes it more tolerant.
But this might not be the only bug in Sherlock. Driver developer Anton Rang said that he found a different problem.
"If you use the new Internet control panel in MacOS 8.5 to set up HTTP proxies," Rang said, "and then run Sherlock, it works fine – you can get through the firewall and do your searches."
But, he said, if you then run Apple's old, now-unsupported Web browser, CyberDog, trouble occurs.
"[If you] try to access a Web site through [Cyberdog], you'll get an error and won't be able to connect," Rang said. "If you open the proxy settings in Cyberdog, they all look right. Cyberdog will work at first, "but the next time you run Sherlock, it will fail."
The trouble appears to be in the way Sherlock reads and writes to the Internet configuration preferences file. In the preferences file, CyberDog sets a space character instead of the default colon character in between the host name and the port number of the proxy server, thus confusing the Sherlock search engine.
Sherlock has been hailed as one of the most exciting features of Apple's MacOS upgrade. It gives developers an opportunity to write search scripts, which can be embedded in other applications. Already, many sites have published custom Sherlock scripts to perform various kinds of custom Web searches.
When it was introduced earlier this month, interim CEO Steve Jobs called Sherlock the best part of the new MacOS.
"This stuff is very cool," he said while previewing the technology at a 14 October address at Cupertino's Flint Center. "Sherlock alone is worth $99, and we'll throw in the rest of the OS for free."
Apple couldn't confirm the bugs, but did say it was looking into the matter.
"We just can't comment at the moment because we need to get to the bottom of it," said Apple spokesman Russell Brady.
