Good bye DTSearch, Hello Archvarius

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Posted by Graham Smith
Dec 29, 2006 at 06:36 PM

Having stuck with DTSearch for years, including regularly updating it, I have finally said good bye. I have never been tempted by the free desktop search tools available as they all seem slow and clunky compared to DTSearch, but I downloaded, trialled and bought Archivarius, and uninstalled DTsearch , all in 24 hours.

Archivarius is at http://www.likasoft.com/document-search/

The indexes are slightly bigger than the DTsearch ones 80mb compared to 60mb for my library of PDFs. Indexing is almost certainly quicker in that took 12 minutes to index the 1400 PDFs. I can’t remember how long DTSearch took, but it was a lot longer than 12 minutes.

DTSearch uses MSIE to view documents while Archivarius views everything as a text file. But it also gives more details about the file you are viewing and all told is a much more useful interface than DTSearch. DTSearch searches are very fast, especially compared with the free options, but Archivarius is like Lightning. A search for “Lutra” in the PDF library mentioned above, popped up 35 docs the instant I hit the search key, compared to 1 - 2 seconds with DTSearch. Moving between docs in Archvarius is also instantaneous where as DTSearch seems to take half a second to render the file image.

Archvarius also produces a file list of any files it hasn’t been able to index, in my case these are “image” PDFs. Using the file list I can now easily find the rogue files and OCR them into a format that can be searched.

It is $30 for personal use.

You will gather I am impressed.

Well worth a look, and with a it only being a 4mb download it isn’t too much of an effort to give it a try.

Graham

Posted by Ike Washington
Dec 30, 2006 at 01:40 AM

Graham

I thought I’d stick up for DT Search.

Thanks for the tip re Archivarius. I’m an old DT Search hand - registered in 2000. Playing around with Archivarius, I agree that it doesn’t compare too badly. Certainly, it’s better than the free desktop search tools available.

And, of course, in terms of cost, there’s no competition: $30 v $200 for DT Search. But since you and I already have licenses…

In other ways, I don’t think Archivarius is as great as you indicate. And, yes, this probably has a lot to do with the fact that I’m comfortable with DT Search, that my workflow has grown up around it.

Your timings are spot on. I find Archivarius to be very slightly faster than DT Search. But I don’t think I really need this: what difference does a second here or there make?

While it’s useful to be able to highlight text, and bookmarks within text are a good idea too, though awkward to use in practice, Archivarius’ text-only search is limiting. I’m used to seeing html files as they look in a browser - all the graphics in place including the photographs. Using Scrapbook in Firefox, I mark up, add notes to html articles etc. I need to see these in my search results.

And with no built-in html browser, there’s no right-click functionality such as send to surfulater, net snippets, evernote.

Archivarius only allows one search window. I find it useful to search with two or more windows open - allows me to make tangential searches.

DT Search lets me segment text files. I cut and paste news on my pda into one long text file with appropriate markings to show starts and ends of stories. When these are indexed by DT Search on my main computer, it segments them; they become easier to read; search results are better.

My biggest gripe with Archivarius is that my cpu usage goes up to 80%, even higher, when it’s indexing. DT Search uses less than half this, lets me carry on working with other applications.

I could go on. I like to be able to see the available indices. Archivarius has a drop down list. Unlike Archivarius, when DT Search opens, the cursor is in the search box.

In short, DT Search is slicker, much more flexible, allows greater customization. As it should be given its price.

Ike

Posted by Graham Smith
Dec 30, 2006 at 08:16 AM

Ike

>I thought I’d stick up for DT Search.

Some excellent points, and if I had more disk space I would probably keep both installed. I have never made that sophisticated use of DTSearch, just used it to find a lost files or a documents with specific words. Then opened the document to work on, or read.

So DTSearch has never really been an integral part of any workflow for me - maybe I have missed a trick here and should look at this again.

Thanks for the post, I found it useful and in fact would have found it useful for you to mention the other advantages of DTSearch.

Graham

Posted by Ike Washington
Dec 30, 2006 at 11:09 PM

Graham Smith wrote:
>Thanks for the post, I found it useful and in fact would have found it
>useful for you to mention the other advantages of DTSearch.

Graham

Further DT Search functions I wouldn’t want to work without:

- Synonyms search
- Search for X within a specified number of words of Y
- Search reports containing the search word(s)/phrase and as much context as needed
- Unindexed searches
- Detailed search histories
- User can change how DT Search recognizes symbols: eg @ as space or symbol
- Macros for regular/complex searches
- User thesaurus
- External view for specified file formats
- View pdf files as plain text if Acrobat is playing up, is too slow

Ike

Posted by Graham Smith
Dec 30, 2006 at 11:21 PM

Ike,
>Further DT Search functions I wouldn’t want to work without:

Very useful, I just haven’t made use of any of these things. Maybe I should be re-installing DTSearch !!

I still think Archivarius is very good, especially for the money.

Thanks,

Graham

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