By Elizabeth Thede, Special for THE TIME USA
With so many people working remotely now, the need for efficient access to shared data is critical. A text search engine can improve that access. dtSearch, for example, has enterprise and developer products that can run “on premises” or on cloud platforms like Azure and AWS to instantly search terabytes of “Office” files, PDFs, emails plus attachments, databases and web-based data. Because dtSearch can instantly search terabytes, many dtSearch customers are large enterprises like Fortune 100 companies and federal, state and international government agencies. But you can also use dtSearch to instantly search your own data.
The dtSearch Engine has two technologies which specifically facilitate shared data access. First, the dtSearch Engine provides document filters enabling easy web-based display of formats that are not classically web-ready such as “Office” files and emails with attachments. Second, dtSearch has over 25 different search options for searching through online and offline data types. An example of how this all ties together is dtSearch virtual data room customer: DataRooms.com
Turning first to the document filters, many “Office” files and emails are not set up by default for web-browser access. That is where the dtSearch document filters come in, because they can parse non-web-ready “Office” and email formats and convert them into HTML for browser display. And the dtSearch Engine document filters work not only for simple “Office” files and emails but even multilevel compressed files and emails. So if you have an email file with a ZIP or RAR attachment, and inside the ZIP or RAR attachment is a PDF and a Microsoft Word file with a Microsoft Access database embedded inside of it, all that is no problem for the dtSearch document filters online display capabilities.
Regarding search, the dtSearch Engine can perform integrated searching across not only “Office” files, PDF, emails and attachments, but also backend databases like SQL or NoSQL and SharePoint as well other web-based content that may appear in a shared data space. That way, an end-user can enter a single search request like Project ABC and Event XYZ to appear in metadata content along with chocolate bars within 12 words of candy corn to appear in full-text content and dtSearch will find all relevant data. And dtSearch can display the content with highlighted hits and hit-to-hit navigation for convenient browsing.
dtSearch is further set up for efficient multithreaded searching, with no built-in limit on the number of concurrent search threads. On the technical end, online searching can run in a completely stateless manner, making it very easy to scale. And updating a search index – which dtSearch builds on its own and uses for instantly searching terabytes – does not block out new search requests. Searching can go on without delay while the index updates itself.
DataRooms.com brings together all of these technologies. Enterprise decision making such as due diligence review typically requires a shared space for data disclosure and collaboration. DataRooms.com provides virtual data rooms for customers like investment and commercial banking organizations, private equity firms, commercial real estate, the pharmaceuticals industry, the oil and gas industry and the legal industry.
The DataRooms.com integration lets DataRoom.com’s clients instantly search all materials uploaded to the data room, even “paper” documents. DataRooms.com includes built-in optical character recognition or OCR to turn paper images into online-ready digital content. And with the embedded dtSearch Engine functionality, the online digital content becomes instantly searchable content.
One of dtSearch’s search options is fuzzy searching. This is adjustable from 0 to 10 to sift through potential OCR errors resulting from blurry originals. And it can also sift through other typographical errors, like people make all the time in formats like emails. So, for example, if chocolate bar becomes choco1ate bar, dtSearch can find that in a search for chocolate bar with a low level of fuzziness.
dtSearch also has other text search options apart from classic text retrieval which can be useful for sifting through online data such as the ability to recognize valid credit cards in data. Developer options like drill-down faceted searching let an end-user “click down” to just the right subset of data that they are interested in prior to performing a search. And advanced data classification options can granularly filter exactly what search results an enterprise wants an end-user to be able to see, optionally using not only database and other document metadata for filtering, but also full-text elements as well.
For ready-made collaborative online data review, please check out DataRooms.com. And please go to dtSearch.com, and download a fully-functional 30-day evaluation version of dtSearch.
RELATED: Kevin Price of the Price of Business show discusses the topic with Thede on a recent interview.
