Kevin Price of the Price of Business show discusses the topic with Thede on a recent interview.
With National Lighthouse Day coming up in the summer, it seems like a good time to delve into search results navigation. Enterprise search lets multiple end-users instantly and simultaneously search through terabytes. If a search leads to just a handful of responsive files, search results navigation is easy. When a search returns hundreds or thousands of files, navigating search results is more of an issue. But let me back up a step and cover how the searching phase of enterprise search works.
How enterprise search works. Enterprise search like dtSearch® lets multiple end-users instantly and simultaneously search through terabytes only after initially indexing the data. While concurrent searching is resource-light, indexing is resource intensive, although a dtSearch 64-bit multithreaded indexing option greatly accelerates this process. Although resource-intensive for the software, indexing is easy for the network administrator or anyone else setting this up.
Just point to the email archives, folders and the like to cover and the indexer will take it from there. The indexer does not retrieve each file in its associated application as that would take way too long. Instead, the indexer goes straight to each file’s binary format to parse it. The parsing process needs to identify every unique word and number in the file and the location of all occurrences in that file.
Supported data types. The indexer needs to correctly identify the file format of each item before parsing it: PDF, Microsoft Word, Access, Excel, OneNote, PowerPoint, web-based formats, different email formats, etc. But the indexer can do this on its own using information from the binary format. That way, it doesn’t matter if a file has a mismatched file extension like a PDF saved with a .DOCX extension or a Word document saved with a .PDF extension.
The indexer can handle not only individual local and remote files but also multilevel nested files such as an email with a RAR or ZIP attachment containing an Excel spreadsheet which itself embeds a Word document. Further, so long as dtSearch can see the folders to index through the Windows file system, the files themselves can be local or remote like OneDrive files, SharePoint attachments or DropBox files.
In terms of 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 build and end-users simultaneously and instantly search. As data evolves, automatic index updates can account for new, deleted and edited files. And automatic updates can proceed without disrupting ongoing concurrent searching.
Search options. After indexing, dtSearch offers over 25 different search options, from simple “all words” or “any words” searches to highly structured phrase, Boolean (and/or/not) plus proximity queries. Concept searching extends a search request to thesaurus or user-defined synonyms. Fuzzy searching adjusts from 1 to 10 to sift through typographical and OCR errors like lightJouse for lighthouse. Searching can also pick up numbers and numeric ranges. Date and date range searching extend automatically to different date formats. A search for date(July 15, 2026 to August 31, 2026) would pick up not only August 7, 2026—National Lighthouse Day—but also Aug 7 2026 and 8/7/26.
Advanced search features include hash value generation and retrieval along with credit card number identification. For international languages, dtSearch supports Unicode which automatically works with hundreds of international languages including European languages with different alphabets, double-byte Asian text and right-to-left Middle Eastern languages. A single file or email can go through numerous Unicode encodings, and dtSearch will follow along.
Navigating a large volume of search results—refining a search request. Some searches can lead to hundreds or even thousands of responsive files. One way to approach a large volume of retrieved files is to refine the search request. If a full-text query for (eastern seaboard w/7 lighthouse) and (dangerous currents or riptides) but not cruise ship retrieves hundreds of files, adding in a metadata element can narrow down the list of retrieved files. Along with looking for files matching the original search request, the metadata element could, for example, require storm preparedness in subject metadata or date(January 15, 2025 to October 15, 2026) in file date metadata to winnow search results.
Navigating a large volume of search results—re-sorting options. Re-sorting search results is another navigation technique. By default, dtSearch orders search results via relevancy-ranking. Take an “any words” search for currents, riptides or storms. If currents and storms are common across indexed data but riptides only comes up a few times, then riptides files would get a higher relevancy ranking, with files with the densest mentions coming out on top. dtSearch also supports variable term weighting like giving currents a positive weighting of 9, storms a positive ranking of 3, and placid a negative ranking of 6 for hits anywhere, in certain metadata or towards the top or bottom of a file. For a different perspective on search results, the software can instantly re-sort by a different metric like file date or file location.
Navigating a large volume of search results—hit highlighting and other options. dtSearch displays a full copy of retrieved files with highlighted hits. The display can show hit highlights in a single color like yellow. Or, to potentially make browsing easier, the display can highlight hits in different colors, like currents in yellow, riptides in light green and storms in light blue. Alternatively, a search report can compile all hits with any amount of context into one unified document for convenient review. The search report can cover all retrieved files or just certain files. A copy function selects files to copy, and even works for files inside a larger archive like ZIP or RAR or an email archive.
In sum, while exploring the shoreline for National Lighthouse Day, don’t forget to navigate through the oceans of your own data with enterprise search. Download a fully-functional 30-day evaluation copy anytime from dtSearch.com
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 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 from dtSearch.com
Connect with Elizabeth Thede on social media:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/elizabeth-thede-4a5a042/
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