I recently replaced Spotlight with Alfred and realized how much I was missing out. It's surprisingly faster and cleaner. I would really suggest it to anyone who haven't tried it yet.
Now is probably the time to replace Spotlight as well. I wasn't terribly satisfied with it either for one simple reason: I open one specific file called "todo.taskpaper" with Spotlight all the time. So while I type t-o-d-... Spotlight doesn't remember that I want to open this specific file. I don't open anything else from Spotlight that starts with "tod" or even "to".
Quick test in Alfred: Seems to have learned that "to" = "todo.taskpaper" after 1 try.
I recently replaced Alfred with Spotlight when I upgraded to Yosemite.
Alfred feels like it was very much an "inspiration" for the new Spotlight but as is often the way with little helper type apps, if it's good enough, sooner or later it will get rolled into the OS.
The business model Joel Spolsky referred to as grabbing nickels from the path of an on-coming steamroller.
I haven't looked a lot at Yosemites spotlight, can it do custom workflows? I've make Alfred ping multiple devices for sub-second status, create files based on input>bash script, close apps and so much more than that. I've completely replaced my snippet/text-expander with Alfred (just need a basic one anyway) and the fact that it can be semi-infinitely extended (scripting etc) is a nice ground to stand on.
