By Elizabeth Thede, USA Daily Chronicles
Looking to get your ducks in a row for the new year but don’t want to spend time organizing? With zero organizational effort, enterprise search can get you and all of your co-workers simultaneously and instantly searching through terabytes.
Enterprise search such as dtSearch® dtSearch.com instantly searches terabytes after first indexing the data. A search index is not like a reference book index. Rather, a search index is just an internal mechanism that pre-collects all unique words and numbers in the data, and their position in the data.
As I’m sure you already have a lot on your plate starting the new year, know that indexing is a lot of work for the software, but not for you. All you need to do is point to the folders, email archives, etc. to cover, and the software will do the rest. In fact, here is a list of 10 things that you *don’t* need to worry about with indexing.
No Worry #1: Don’t worry about too much data. A single dtSearch index can hold up to a terabyte, and there are no limits on the number of indexes that the software can build and instantly query.
No Worry #2: Don’t worry about identifying file types to index. The indexer does need to identify the file format of each item to parse it correctly: Microsoft Word, PowerPoint, Excel, Access, OneNote, PDF, email formats, web-ready formats, etc. But the indexer can determine that by itself looking inside each binary file.
No Worry #3: It doesn’t matter if a file has a mismatched file extension, like a Microsoft Word document saved with a .PDF extension. Because the indexer uses the binary file itself for file format identification, a mismatched file extension won’t matter.
No Worry #4: Don’t worry about distributed data. A single index can cover any number of local and remote data repositories. Online content like Office 365 files and SharePoint attachments that present as part of the Windows folder system index just like local data. After indexing, search requests can cover all local and remote data in a unified fashion, including integrated relevancy-ranking.
No Worry #5: International language data is also not a concern. Unicode support lets dtSearch automatically work with hundreds of Unicode languages. These include European languages; right-to-left languages like Hebrew and Arabic; and double-byte Asian languages like Chinese, Japanese and Korean. A single file or email can have multiple Unicode encodings, and dtSearch will track them all.
No Worry #6: Don’t worry about concealed text. A file can have black text against a black background or white text against a white background that may be very hard to spot in a file’s native application. But the indexer can still handle that just like any other text.
No Worry #7: Similarly, no need to worry about obscure metadata. It is easy to miss certain metadata viewing a file in its native application. But all metadata is readily apparent in a file’s binary format.
No Worry #8: Compressed and recursively nested “Office” files are also not an issue. You can have an email with a ZIP or RAR attachment containing a Word document with an Excel spreadsheet nested inside, and the search engine can parse each component correctly.
No Worry #9: You know those pesky PDFs that are really just an image file so when you try to “copy and paste” what looks like words from inside of them you get nothing? The indexer can flag those pesky PDFs during indexing, so you know to run them through an OCR engine like Adobe Acrobat and then bring them back to the indexer.
No Worry #10: Last on the “no worry” list are index updates. You can set indexes to automatically update as often as you want. Index updates won’t affect searching, including concurrent searching.
While indexing is resource intensive, searching is not. Network-based or online search threads can execute independently, making instant concurrent searching fully scalable. Further, each end-user can select from over 25 different search features, ranging from free-form natural language to precision Boolean and/or/not and proximity full-text and metadata query formulations.
Concept search can extend a search term to synonyms. Fuzzy search adjusts from 1 to 10 to sift through typographical or OCR errors. Searching can find specific numbers or numeric ranges. Date and date range search can automatically extend across common date formats so a search for date(December 10 2023 to January 5 2024) would find both Dec 15, 2023 and 12/20/23. dtSearch can further flag credit card numbers in indexed data.
Searching can even cover specific Unicode emojis🎉. After a search, enterprise search can display a full copy of retrieved items with highlighted hits for easy navigation. The software has multiple options for relevancy-ranking search results. Or end-users can instantly re-sort by a completely different metric like file date or file location for a new window on search results and highlighted-hits browsing.
So forget lining up your ducks to find data as you move into the new year. Please go to dtSearch.com to download a fully-functional 30-day evaluation version to get started on finding anything instantly, with zero organizational effort.
About dtSearch®. dtSearch has enterprise and developer products that run “on premises” or on cloud platforms to instantly search terabytes of “Office” files, PDFs, emails along with nested attachments, databases and online data. Because dtSearch can instantly search terabytes with over 25 different search features, many dtSearch customers are Fortune 100 companies and government agencies. But anyone with lots of data to search can download a fully-functional 30-day evaluation copy from dtSearch.com
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