Looking at Organizing Your Data This Fall? Consider a Search Engine Instead
By Elizabeth Thede, Special for USA Daily Times
Even if the leaves haven’t started turning yet where you live, pumpkin-flavored coffee will tell you that fall is near. For squirrels, time to think about organizing their annual stash of acorns. For humans, time to think about organizing the mass of data from the first 3 Quarters of the year, and likely all preceding years.
While this may sound like a lot of work, I’m here to suggest a short cut. A search engine like dtSearch® lets you instantly sift through terabytes of online and offline data without organizing a thing. All of the benefits of organization, and none of the effort.
dtSearch instantly searches terabytes by first indexing all of the data. Just point to the folders and the like you want to be able to instantly search, and dtSearch will do the rest. For multiuser environments, dtSearch has concurrent searching with no limit on the number of simultaneous search threads that can proceed instantly and independently across the indexed data.
dtSearch products can run as off-the-shelf applications on a PC, across a Windows network or on a web server. Developers can also embed the dtSearch Engine SDK in their own applications. For use in an online environment, either as an off-the-shelf product or through the dtSearch Engine developer SDK, dtSearch products can run “on premises” or on a third-party hosting platform like Azure or AWS. However dtSearch runs, dtSearch Corp. will not see your data.
The dtSearch product line works with major file types like Microsoft Word, Excel, Access, PowerPoint and OneNote, and PDFs, including PDF portfolios. The products work with compressed archives, like ZIP and RAR, as well as online data formats like HTML, XML and ASP.NET text. dtSearch also works with databases like SharePoint, SQL and NoSQL, although this latter set requires the dtSearch Engine developer SDK.
Additionally, the product line supports popular email formats, including Outlook and Exchange, PST, OST, MSG and EML. And dtSearch not only works with the emails themselves but also email attachments, including even nested email attachments. If you have an email with a ZIP attachment that contains a PDF file and a Microsoft Excel file, and embedded in the Excel file is a Microsoft Access file, dtSearch works with all of that.
Importantly, in working with all of these data types, dtSearch will automatically figure out on its own the relevant file format. For online use, dtSearch can work with even non-web-ready file formats like non-web-ready Microsoft Office files and emails, effectively making these automatically “online ready” even if they aren’t. dtSearch does this by converting these formats “on the fly” to HTML for browser-based display, including display with highlighted hits of the full item following a search.
dtSearch has over 25 different full-text and metadata hit-highlighted search options, including word and phrase searching, Boolean (and/or/not) search requests, proximity searching finding a term within X words of another term in either direction or just one direction, concept/synonym searching, advanced date recognition, numeric range searching, credit card identification, forensics-oriented search options like hash tag generation and search, numerous options for relevancy-ranking, and much more. For text that may have typographical or OCR errors like email messages or OCR’ed PDFs, dtSearch has fuzzy searching adjustable from levels one to ten to sift through potential misspellings.
dtSearch automatically works with the hundreds of Unicode-based languages. Support includes right-to-left text like Hebrew and Arabic and double-byte Asian text such as Chinese, Japanese or Korean. Even options like fuzzy searching work with these international languages.
If there are changes to the data, dtSearch can reindex just those files that have been added, changed or deleted since the last indexing job. dtSearch lets you automatically schedule updates through the Windows Task Scheduler. Updating an index does not block searching so even concurrent searching can continue during index updates.
In conclusion, 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 precision search options, 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 – no organizational skills or effort required.
RELATED: Kevin Price of the Price of Business show discusses the topic with Thede on a recent interview.
