ALPHA - Speed Test of text search on PDF, TXT, DOC, HTML

ricmarte · Post by **ricmarte** » 2005 Feb 13, 22:14

Hi folks;

Just tried the pdf and doc search and it is pretty sweet. You do need to download an addin from Adobe. Read the changes.txt file included in the alpha download. But here is the link: http://www.adobe.com/support/salesdocs/1004717.html

I filtered a folder so it only contained PDF, TXT, DOC, HTML files. I filtered first because i was concerned that X2 would try and read through every file type. I only wanted to test whether it could read through these text file types. I wonder if an option to specify the types of text files one wants to search can be added to the menu or registry. Until then pre-filtering with Grey+ is fine. OK, back to the test.

The folder totaled 161 files taking up 62.2Mb.

I asked X2-alpha to seach all files for the term "significance"

The seach took about 90 seconds. The term was identified in all file types several times.

I have a
Dell P4 1.80
640 RDRAM
40Gb RAID1 with Adaptec 1200a card

By the way, I had a few tiny apps open in the background. so I think these are great results.

Adding PDF and Doc text search is a nice feature when you are trying to write a paper but don't remember where you found that citation you were going to include. This is sweet!

Forget those desktop search engines that need to run in the background, ...use X2!

-Ricardo

wocius · Post by **wocius** » 2005 Feb 14, 02:50

Thanks for the link. Can you explain how to get x2 to recognize the add-in once it's downloaded? :oops: I didn't see that in the Adobe document.

TIA

Wo

narayan · Post by **narayan** » 2005 Feb 14, 04:35

x2 does not have a menu option (like Excel) to activate plugins etc.. Just ruunning the IFilter will do it!

Manual will be released along with the official version of x2. Right now it's alpha!

Post by **nikos** » 2005 Feb 14, 07:56

i was concerned that X2 would try and read through every file type

if you want to limit the scope of a x2 search, just add the file types in the Named field, e.g *.pdf, *.doc would limit the search to pdf and word documents

it's good to see that it works. That download just has to be installed and x2 will automatically pick it up

Forget those desktop search engines that need to run in the background

that's the spirit

of course the attraction with those is that you get your results instantly but then again you can only search for text

ricmarte · Post by **ricmarte** » 2005 Feb 14, 10:16

if you want to limit the scope of a x2 search, just add the file types in the Named field, e.g *.pdf, *.doc would limit the search to pdf and word documents

Ah! Thanks. Thats a lot simpler.

Quote:
Forget those desktop search engines that need to run in the background

that's the spirit Smile
of course the attraction with those is that you get your results instantly but then again you can only search for text

Aside from the security risk of desktop search engines that connect to the Internet for ads, you have the resource issue of engines running in the background in order to remain updated.

Then there is the space issue. After trying one, the index for my system was 186Mb large. I could use 100th that space in .cida files with not much more patience and get similar if not better results.

Maybe I'm just biased because I like the new file management control I have X2.