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dtSearch Review

Hard disks sizes and the flow of information continue to grow unabated. It’s not unusual to find desktop computers with hard disks of capacities exceeding 1 terabyte (TB). The amount of storage space on a small network can easily exceed several TB. The obvious question is how do you find what you’re looking for?

The search capabilities of Windows have never been strong. Windows 7 is better than previous versions but still not very good. Google Desktop is far more powerful. It creates an index of files on your computer’s hard drives and on network drives too, if desired. Then you do a Google-style search by entering a few words or a phrase that appear in the files you are looking for. If you are prepared to learn the syntax, you can perform simple Boolean searches for greater precision. Google Desktop is good but not good enough. It merely whets the appetite for something more useful.

dtSearch Corp. is the developer of a product line of text retrieval software, also called dtSearch. I started using dtSearch software over 15 years ago. I recently started using dtSearch Desktop 7.63 and it’s an exceptionally powerful and refined search tool. It can create multiple indexes of all my documents and it can perform searches using one or more indexes. It is far easier to use than Google Desktop and far more precise.

Here’s how a typical search works: When I load dtSearch, I see that it is set up to use an index called “Docs on local drives”. That’s what I want. There’s a scrolling box containing the indexed word list. I can choose search terms from this list or type them in myself. I can create Boolean expressions with the help of a menu, using the operators such as “and”, “or,” “not” and w/25. For example, (EMR w/25 PACS) would retrieve any file that contained EMR within 25 words of PACS. Any number can be used instead of 25.

Other sophisticated search features can be employed. I can perform a fuzzy search and even choose the degree of fuzziness. Fuzzy searches show a tolerance for errors. If I’m looking for all documents that contain terms which might be misspelled, a fuzzy search will find them regardless.

Searches are almost instantaneous, regardless of the number of files being searched. I’ve never searched across a terabyte of text but dtSearch claims search times of about 1 second for several terabytes. When dtSearch displays retrieved files it can sort them by relevance, date, or hit count. Each file is listed with its “score”, number of hits, and location. It takes a single mouse click to bring up the file in the program that created it.
DtSearch Desktop has more features than I can hint at here. It is easy to learn and to use, it’s fast, and it helps me find what I’m looking for. Often it helps me find information I didn’t know I had. It isn’t free but its modest cost is negligible compared to the value it unlocks in your data.

30-day evaluation versions can be downloaded at www.dtsearch.com.

Posted March 4, 2010