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

Outliners.com Message ID: 3407

Posted by stephenz
2005-06-17 15:54:39

This discussion of searching raises the question as to which programs provide the best searches of internal data. I don’t have extensive experience with all the programs we discuss, but three jump out at me as being above average. Their differences, however, are also instructive:

1. AskSam is fast and powerful in its searches. AS also gives you your results in an easy to explore way, listing documents that match your criteria, and highlighting the selected words in the documents.
2. InfoSelect is also lightning fast, and provides a variety of search options, including boolean expressions. The results are not as definitively presented as in AskSam. In fact, because it shows you the parent topics as well as the topics that match your requirements, it can be a little confusing.
3. Zoot is surprisingly strong in its searches, primarily due to its many options for performing searches. It is fast and presents a shrinking list of hits as you complete your text strings. Zoot provides different approaches, depending upon whether or not you are searching a single database or doing a global query. The dialog box for building a global query makes it easy. It took about 15 seconds to complete a global query over 31 different databases. Perhaps a little long, but acceptable.

I don’t use UltraRecall’s search very often, but imagine it must be fast. I find its process kind of confusing and unintuitive, but that’s something that would likely go away if I used it much.

Getting the data out is crucial, of course, so what are some of your recommendations?

Steve Z.

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