Kevin Price of the Price of Business show discusses the topic with Thede on a recent interview.
For those who aren’t familiar with dtSearch®, what does dtSearch do?
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 concurrent 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
What is today’s topic?
Whatever your view on tariffs, all this global trade turmoil highlights the fact that no country is an island. Likewise, no company is an island, not even one in a narrow vertical like enterprise search software. Along with enterprise products, dtSearch offers developer solutions. dtSearch does not, however, do custom development work. Contegra Systems, contegrasystems.com, is a long-time provider of custom development services for the dtSearch developer market. Contegra customers range from small businesses to Fortune 500 corporations to non-profits and government entities. Contegra developed its KaleidoSearch™ interface after years of dtSearch development experience.
Can you say a little more about the KaleidoSearch interface?
The initial KaleidoSearch release embedding the dtSearch Engine SDK focused on user-friendly faceted search implementation. Faceted search lets end-users drill down through multiple layers of metadata to get to just the right data subset before precision searching. Contegra subsequently expanded KaleidoSearch’s file display, tagging and downloading as well as adding Active Directory support, a word wheel and an enhanced query builder. A large litigation practice was the impetus for this newest KaleidoSearch release. The litigation practice needed to streamline document review in searches returning thousands of matching files.
Does the new KaleidoSearch add anything else?
PDF is an important file format for dtSearch customers. For highlighting hits in PDFs, dtSearch products rely on a custom plug-in that runs inside Adobe Acrobat Reader. Contegra offers a server-side alternative to this approach. Contegra’s server-based PDF highlighter works not only with the latest KaleidoSearch release but also independently with other dtSearch developer products.
Can you say more about the dtSearch developer products?
dtSearch’s core developer product is the dtSearch Engine, including 64-bit Windows, Linux and current macOS builds. The dtSearch Engine can run on-premises or in the cloud such as on Azure or AWS. dtSearch’s own document filters provide file format support. The document filters work with online and offline data spanning popular “Office” formats, web content, databases, compression formats and emails plus attachments.
How does dtSearch work?
dtSearch instantly searches terabytes only after initially indexing the data. But indexing is easy. Just point to the folders, email archives and the like to index, and the dtSearch indexer will take it from there. While file format identification is critical for correct file parsing, the dtSearch document filters can correctly identify the file format even in cases where files have misplaced extensions like a PDF with a .DOCX extension, an Access database with an Excel extension or a OneNote file with a PowerPoint extension.
What about remote file data?
The indexer can work with local or remote files like Office 365 / OneDrive files, SharePoint attachments and DropBox files that present through the Windows folder system. The indexer can even work with recursively nested files. If an email has a RAR or ZIP attachment encompassing an Excel spreadsheet with a Word document nested inside, dtSearch will support the whole thing down to the innermost text and metadata.
What is indexing capacity?
A single dtSearch index can hold up to a terabyte of text and there are no limits on the number of indexes that dtSearch can create and simultaneously search. Indexed search can work across multiple environments, including a classic Windows network, an on-premises Internet or Intranet server or a cloud install such as on Azure or AWS. As data evolves, dtSearch can keep its indexes updated without affecting instant concurrent searching across any of these environments.
What about search features?
dtSearch has over 25 different search option ranging from basic “any words” or “all words” searches to more advanced Boolean (and/or/not), phase and proximity queries. Search the full text of files or limit search components to particular metadata. Fuzzy searching adjusts from 1 to 10 to sift through typographical and OCR deviations. Concept searching reaches similar concepts. Along with word-based searching, dtSearch can also search for number and numeric ranges plus dates and date ranges automatically extending across common date formats. dtSearch can even generate and search for hash values or flag credit card numbers in indexed data.
Speaking of international tariffs, how does international language search work?
Current file types rely on Unicode, Unicode.org, encoding. dtSearch picks this up when it parses files and emails. A single file or email can go from double-byte Asian text to right-to-left Hebrew and Arabic, to English and other European alphabets. Unicode and dtSearch will follow all of that.
How does dtSearch sort search results?
Default relevancy-ranking elevates rarer over more common search terms across indexed data, with denser instances of rarer search terms getting the highest relevancy rank. But dtSearch also supports custom positive or negative term weighting across the text of all files, in specific metadata, or near the top or bottom of a file. For a different window on search results, dtSearch enables instant re-sorts using a brand new metric like file location or file date. In all cases, dtSearch displays retrieved files with highlighted hits for easy navigation.
Final thoughts?
dtSearch.com has fully-functional 30-day evaluation enterprise search downloads to get you started on instant concurrent searching across terabytes. And check out Contegra Systems at contegrasystems.com for dtSearch custom development work and their KaleidoSearch dtSearch Engine interface.
Connect with Elizabeth Thede on social media:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/elizabeth-thede-4a5a042/
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