PIMS and Search Engines

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Note: This message is from the outliners.com archive kindly provided by Dave Winer.

Outliners.com Message ID: 1234

Posted by aaces
2002-01-12 19:11:06

Many of us use Outliners and PIMS for many tasks and in many fields. Regrettably few, if any, meet all the needs of many of us. I used GrandView for a multitude of purposes and not one of the Windows PIMs or Outliners can take its place.

So, I am forced to use more than one PIm and Outliner, still cannot cover all of my needs with them. Moreover, development of these products can stop at any moment. It may resume (as did TreePad) but we still are left with the possibility that we’ve spent hundreds of hours putting information into a PIM format that may become obsolete.

Transferring our information to a new PIM becomes an overwhelming task. So what should we do?

For my part, I’ve decided to let the info lie where it is and use a search engine to retrieve it. This does not provide all the information linkages I might desire, but some search engines do give me much more flexibility than does Microsoft’s Find utilty.

The two most useful nonindexing ones I’ve found that are quite fast are the free Agent Ransack (http://www.agentransack.com) and the new,inexpensive Searchopia IE 4.0 (http://www.sunrizen.com). Both are equally fast. For anything beyond the simplest text search, AR requires that you be familiar with “regular expressions.” S, on the other hand, gives you a multitude of easily set up choices to focus a search.

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