Trick or Treat to a Search Engine

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By Elizabeth Thede, Special for USA Daily Times,

dtSearch enterprise and developer products instantly search terabytes of “Office” files, PDFs, emails along with nested attachments, databases and Internet or Intranet data. Because dtSearch can instantly search terabytes, many

dtSearch customers are large enterprises like 4 out of 5 of the Fortune 500’s biggest Aerospace and Defense companies and federal, state and international government agencies.
But along with enterprise-level search, dtSearch also lets you instantly search your own Word, Excel, PowerPoint,

Access, OneNote, XML, HTML, PDF, ZIP and RAR files and emails plus attachments to see if they contain important terms for fall like “trick or treat.” And not just “trick or treat” but “trick or treat” leveraging all of dtSearch’s search options.

dtSearch has over 25 different search features, both for individual use and for concurrent multithreaded enterprise use. All those search features add up to a lot of different ways to search for “trick or treat.”

• You could enter “trick or treat” as a Boolean “or” search, finding any file, email and the like that contains either the word “trick” or the word “treat.”
• Or you could a search for “trick and treat” as a Boolean “and” search. That would look for both “trick” and “treat” in the same file.
• Or you could do a phrase search for “trick or treat” so only files that contain “trick or treat” as a phrase would come up.
• Or you could enter “trick or treat” as a more complex Boolean search. For example, you could find “trick or treat” as a phrase but only in documents that contains “lollipops” and “gum drops” and not the word “licorice.”

So that covers Boolean and/or/not and phrase searching. But there is more.

• You could do a proximity search for “trick” within 7 words of “treat.”
  Or you could do a directed proximity search so you could find only files that contain “trick” within 18 words before “treat.”
• Or you could enter “trick or treat” with stemming activated to find different endings on the same route words, like “trick or treaters” along with “trick or treat.”
• Or you could automatically find not only “trick” or “treat” but synonyms of the words “trick” or the word “treat.”
• Or you could enter “trick or treat” with fuzzy searching on to find slight misspellings of “trick or treat.” For example, in emails everyone mistypes. So it could be “trick” or “treath,” and with fuzzy searching, dtSearch would still find it.

And then there are still more “trick or treat” options.

• You could enter “trick or treat” as a natural language search. A natural language search would apply a vector space relevancy ranking algorithm. In plain English, what that means is if “trick” appears in 10 thousand files and “treat” appears in just 200 files, then “treat” would get a higher relevancy ranking as it is less common so presumably more relevant.
• Or you could apply variable term weighting. So “trick” could get a positive ranking of say 8 and “treat” could get a negative ranking of say 2.
• Or you could look for the phrase “trick or treat” only if it appears in specific metadata, like an email subject heading.
• Or you could combine a search for “trick or treat” with a completely different type of search, like finding “trick or treat” only in emails which also contain a validated credit card number.
• After a search, you could highlight “trick or treat” with the same highlight color, or you could highlight “trick” in yellow and “treat” in orange. And if you are adding on “licorice,” you could highlight that in red.
• Or you could generate a search report which compiles all of the different “trick or treat” hits into a single file showing each “trick or treat” hit with as many words of context as you select.

With the developer version of dtSearch, you can do take “trick or treat” one step further still.

• You could have “trick or treat” as a metadata facet, with different faceted search drill down options like lollipops, chocolate, gum drops, candy corn, etc.
• Or you could enter “trick or treat” with granular data classification, so that different concurrent users can have differential data access. So there could be an eyes-only “trick or treat” classification which only a few users can access. A different data slice containing “trick or treat” could be accessible to the HR department. And still another data slice containing “trick or treat” could be accessible to the legal department.

Bottom line, go to dtSearch.com, download and try a fully-functional 30-day evaluation version to instantly “trick or treat” search terabytes of your own data.