VERY impressed with dtSearch - application and sales

[Darwin]

Just wanted to let everyone know that my experience with dtSearch has been first rate. I contacted them about an academic discount and was very pleased with the result. Add to that that dtSearch is a phenomenal search engine and you've got two-thirds of a winning combination (can't comment on technical support yet..., though from what I can gather it is first-rate as well).

Thought this might be a nice way to counter-balance the other threads that I've started on this board, which have been whinging and moaning affairs... 

[Grorgy]

  at that price it would want to work well 

[Darwin]

  at that price it would want to work well 

Indeed!

[cranioscopical]

Thanks for posting, Mike.
It's hands-on experiences such as these that help the rest of us in our decision making,
especially since nobody else on the planet has as much software as your good self.
(I always imagine your machine ending up like this)[attach]

[Darwin]

Heh, heh - close, Chris! I have four notebooks, though... but they are all battle hardened and battle scarred!

What I like about dtSearch is how many search options there are and the fact that it's purely a fire it up and use it application - no scheduler, no auto-start feature on by default, etc. Thus, you index what you want and then update the resulting index/indices when you want. The initial indexing took on the order of 2.5 hours for 17 GB of data and updates run a "few" minutes (on the order of 2-6 minutes). Add to this the excellent previewing capabilities and it's a very robust search tool. I find it to be intermediate between Archivarius (still one of my faves - but dtSearch features superior Outlook PST scanning support and much, much better file previewing. Note, though that dtSearch is a 35MB download versus Archivarius' 3 MB and that Archivarius is overall the lightest of the three) and X1, which features hands-down the best previewing capabilities courtesy of its use of Stellent viewers but is prone to hanging and is head and shoulders above the other two in terms of resource hogging! Still, the latest version of X1 is much, much, much more stable than previous versions and is thus quite usable.

[Armando]

Thanks for the info Darwin, I might give dtSearch another try...

[J-Mac]

No Chris....

That's MY machine!

Jim

[Darwin]

Armando - note that as far as I've been able to tell, dtSearch won't index the comments field in word docs (or docx) out of the box. I haven't yet discovered a setting to enable it, either. X1 is the same - hasn't indexed my Comments fields and I can't see how to make it do so. Archivarius, on the other hand, picks them up every time 

EDIT: X1 found the test comment that I had created after I posted this - doesn't actually show the comment field though, so it's a bit weird having a document highlighted without the word searched for evident in the preview...

[Armando]

EDIT: X1 found the test comment that I had created after I posted this - doesn't actually show the comment field though, so it's a bit weird having a document highlighted without the word searched for evident in the preview...

Yes, I know, weird. There are also other weirdnesses in X1, but all in all, it's fast. I actually find it faster than Archivarius  for multiple terms searches (or complete phrases) -- especially the first search : subsequent searches are quicker, which is expected. Once archivarius has done its first search, it's actually almost as fast as X1.

Note that I haven't installed X1's last version. I didn't find the change log compelling. I might give it a try anyways. Shouldn't do anything bad, hopefully.