any updated lists of things with good search?


**best post on search** (could be more simplified tho, good usage of caps as **bolds**)

- (2016) http://www.outlinersoftware.com/topics/viewt/6316/0/list-of-all-the-info-managers-with-search-folders


**search as you type** (onenote has this and some other things has this)

- (2015) http://www.outlinersoftware.com/topics/viewt/5971/0/search-as-you-type


**'smart' folders**

- (2015) http://www.outlinersoftware.com/topics/viewt/6006/0/text-editors-with-smart-folder-saved-search-filter-functionality


**searching within attached files**

- (2015) http://www.outlinersoftware.com/topics/viewt/6050/0/any-windows-offline-note-taker-apps-that-allows-to-import-ms-office-msg-docx-xlsx-and-pdf-files-and-search-within-them
- (2015) www.outlinersoftware.com/topics/viewt/5991/0/programs-that-search-attachments


current 2018 solution?

- unknown http://www.outlinersoftware.com/topics/viewt/8160/0/effective-searching-finding-your-info

in case anything was missed, could just add

https://www.powergrep.com/index.html?wlr=1
https://jblevins.org/projects/deft/
https://dtsearch.com/
https://geoff.greer.fm/ag/

I've seen mention of dtsearch a few times in the forum. Does anyone know of a decent 'front end' for dtsearch? I know it's not meant for a general desktop user, but would be curious if others have found its interface a bit lacking.

x1 is a lot more user friendly (and cheaper), https://www.x1.com/products/x1_search/

But it really depends what exactly you want to search for where. Questions like: what is the best app with search in 2018 can't really be answered.

If you just want to search text files in a set of fixed directories, then grep, ag or some other command line tool is probably hard to beat since they are very fast and also free. You have to learn the syntax, though.

mdlynam wrote:

I've seen mention of dtsearch a few times in the forum. Does anyone
know of a decent 'front end' for dtsearch? I know it's not meant for a
general desktop user, but would be curious if others have found its
interface a bit lacking.

Thanks, Jan.

I do like X1, it's my go-to at work. What I like about dtsearch is the ability to include synonyms in the search. I also use carrot2 now that iMetaSearch is defunct. I really, really, like the ability to see what categories my search results fall in to. That kind of auto-analysis isn't fool-proof, but for me it's a good starting point when assembling and making connections between various topics. I'm babbling and off-topic now.

Sounds like you're more interested in analyzing your notes than retrieving particular pieces. Maybe you should look at topic modeling software. That's quite easy to do when you're data is in plain text format (.txt, .csv etc.; a lot harder when dealing with .pdf and other binary formats).

Some qualitative data analysis software offers those features. I think MAXQDA is the best of those (ATLAS.ti, NVivo, QDAMiner are other ones).

Leximancer is a specialized solution which automatically produces topical concept maps. https://info.leximancer.com/

There are also several free R packages. (All the software that I've mentioned is quite expensive for private/commercial use -- between 1k - 3k $)

mdlynam wrote:

Thanks, Jan.

I do like X1, it's my go-to at work. What I like about dtsearch is the
ability to include synonyms in the search. I also use carrot2 now that
iMetaSearch is defunct. I really, really, like the ability to see what
categories my search results fall in to. That kind of auto-analysis
isn't fool-proof, but for me it's a good starting point when assembling
and making connections between various topics. I'm babbling and
off-topic now.

*your ...........

Jan S. wrote:

you're data is in plain text

Jan S. wrote:

Some qualitative data analysis software offers those features. I think
MAXQDA is the best of those (ATLAS.ti, NVivo, QDAMiner are other ones).

Leximancer is a specialized solution which automatically produces
topical concept maps. https://info.leximancer.com/

Jan, many thanks; this is a fascinating, albeit expensive, market! Just the fact that Leximancer does not mention its price tag in the website speaks volumes...

Are you, by any chance, aware of any such tools that can access and analyze an Evernote database?

Alexander Deliyannis wrote:

Jan S. wrote:
>Some qualitative data analysis software offers those features. I think
>MAXQDA is the best of those (ATLAS.ti, NVivo, QDAMiner are other ones).
>
>Leximancer is a specialized solution which automatically produces
>topical concept maps. https://info.leximancer.com/

Jan, many thanks; this is a fascinating, albeit expensive, market! Just
the fact that Leximancer does not mention its price tag in the website
speaks volumes...

Are you, by any chance, aware of any such tools that can access and
analyze an Evernote database?

A perpetual Leximancer license for commercial use costs 3750 Australian Dollars. NGOs, Academics etc. get significant discounts, though. (https://info.leximancer.com/products-commercial/

Analyzing Evernote databases: Shouldn't be that difficult. Either by parsing the .enex file which -- at least to my knowledge is just XML -- in some kind of dataframe. But that would only be useful if the data has a fairly consistent structure. A better option would probably be to export each note as a single .html file and then importing those in something like Leximancer.

If you want to do the coding yourself you could use the mentioned QDA Software. They all have Evernote integrations (import only). MaxQDA for example can do some auto-coding (dictionary based) and also has a statstics package that includes some common techniques (nothing of the scale of R, SPSS, STATA, Mathematica etc., though).

But I think in general it shouldn't be that complicated because if you have the .html it is pretty easy to convert to .txt, .rtf or whatever the software requires. There are also some free options: (1) for R: http://www.iramuteq.org/ (2) free and open-source: http://khc.sourceforge.net/en/

I have also seen this https://appcenter.evernote.com/app/mohiomap/web-apps -- which is probably a lot less academic (and there are probably privacy concerns). But I have never used it because I don't use Evernote anymore.

Thanks, Jan. Leximancer is pretty intriguing and *whoa* expen$ive! :-)

I appreciate the thought & feedback---

Take care,
Mark

Jan S. wrote:

But I think in general it shouldn't be that complicated because if you
have the .html it is pretty easy to convert to .txt, .rtf or whatever
the software requires. There are also some free options: (1) for R:
http://www.iramuteq.org/ (2) free and open-source:
http://khc.sourceforge.net/en/

Thank you very much!

Devonsphere on Mac is an option