The server portion periodically crawled a set of administrator-configured locations on hard drives, CD-ROMs and the network using AppleShare, indexing the documents it found after converting them to plain text using the Claris XTND document conversion system.
The client portion was essentially a communications module that sent text-based requests to the server and received responses back.
The client portion could be used within programs to integrate search capabilities with relative ease, the API was fairly small.
It required a Mac using a 68040 and 5 MB of RAM as a minimum,[5] which in 1994 was limited to Apple's higher-end offerings.
A basic install with the server and a five-user license cost $1,799, although this was reduced to $1,399 when version 1.5 was released.
AppleSearch originated in the Advanced Technology Group (ATG), Apple's internal R&D labs.