Comment 63 for bug 646724

What if have been asking myself now for a time is the reason why there is no nautilus data source/nautilus data provider?

I suppose I do not get the problem entirely, because otherwise it would have been implemented already.

After you installed a fresh system you could simply copy back all files from a backup hard drive and they should show up then when nautilus notifies Zeitgeist about the copying process of the files.

The only problem would be that you still have to find a way to inform Zeitgeist about all the files which have already been there after you did a system upgrade instead of a fresh install. What, thus, makes the "dig up the past" option still necessary. Anyway I see one big problem with the "dig up the past" action: a normal user will not know that it exists. And therefore a normal user will still think that search in Ubuntu is broken if using the dash to find certain files.

A nautilus data provider would also solve a different problem I recently discovered. Whenever you change the name or location of a file which has already been "indexed" by Zeitgeist, then suddenly the dash won't show it to you anymore. So instead of informing Zeitgeist of the fact that the file has been changed (and this providing Zeitgeist with the new location or the new name of of the file) the file is completely ignored from then on.
Try it. Change a name of a file and then search for it in the dash. Even though it had been found before the change, it won't be found after the renaming.

I know that there is/was the GtkRecentManager and nautilus GIO plugin. But seemingly it does not work the way that I expected.