What you need for high-quality search

Before working with the application you should index all the data, through which you will carry out the search. This means that you should create an index file, which will be utilized by the application for immediate search. When creating the index, you should specify the physical location of the information to be indexed. Evidently, if the data base is continually updated (for examle, the incoming correspondence in form of email letters), it will be necessary to index it once in a while, for the search source data to be always up-to date. The SearchInform indexing speed is of a much higher order that those of analogous applications. Moreover, only creating an index itself can consume considerable time (namely, the initial indexing). Further updating the indexes will be carried out very quickly. To create a new index, you can use the "Index Manager".

Using indexes is a requisite condition of search on the whole. But it can hardly be named a sufficient condition for a high-quality search. To maximize the benefit of using the SearchInform, you should take proper consideration of such application's features as Stemming, Synonyms, Stop words and Important words.

Stemming Unfortunately, the words that appear in documents and in queries often have many morphological variants. Thus, pairs of terms such as "computing" and "computation" will not be recognised as equivalent without some form of natural language processing (NLP).
In most cases, morphological variants of words have similar semantic interpretations and can be considered as equivalent for the purpose of information retrieval applications. For this reason, a number of so-called stemming Algorithms, or stemmers, have been developed, which attempt to reduce a word to its stem or root form. Thus, the key terms of a query or document are represented by stems rather than by the original words. This not only means that different variants of a term can be conflated to a single representative form - it also reduces the dictionary size, that is, the number of distinct terms needed for representing a set of documents. A smaller dictionary size results in a saving of storage space and processing time. In the SearchInform the Stemming algorythm has been integrated to ensure a higher quality and speed of search.

Synonyms are used to determine words similar in their content but different from a morphological point of view. The point is to "teach" the application to regard these words as same. To furnish this by an example, let's assume that you want ot carry out the search by "new car" key phrase. Naturally, the search will display all the variants of documents where the phrase "new plane" has been encountered. Utilizing the stemming will allow to find besides "high-speed plane" combination, such variants as "high-speed aeroplane" etc. But what about such variants as "high-speed airliner", "high-speed aircraft" etc.? Depending on the situation the meaning will be same, but the words are different. Using the synonyms in SearchInform allows to take into consideration all the variants, which results in a multifold increase of the search effectiveness. Synonyms settings are available in the "Synonyms manager".

Stop word are used primarily in the similar content search. Actually stop words are words with a zero informative value and mainly used to connect the main words in the sentense. Stop words can be all kinds of conjunctions, interjections, auxiliary verbs, adjectives etc. The words from the list of stop words are not taken into consideration during search which allows to assess the processed data more realitically and to carry out a trully semantic contextual search. At default the list of stop words consists of a great number of "useles" words, but the user can broaden it to increase the quality and accuracy of search. The only thing to bear in mind is that it's important not to overdo it by adding unnecessary words into the stop list. Managing stop words is implemented in the "Stop words manager".

Important words are actually the exact opposite of stop words. All the words in the Importat words list are priority ones as compared to any other words. Once again this function can be very effectively used when searching for documents of similar content by defining the priority subject of search. High priority of the important words will show in the result list, where the documents with the important words will be positioned closer to top lines than other documents with approximately same degree of relevancy. The distinction in kind between the important and stop words consists in the fact, that using the latter cannot be deactivated while the former can be utilized only when it's really necessary. Important words lists can be created and managed with the help of "Important words manager".

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20th of January SoftInform Company has released new version of full text search program SearchInform 1.8.02. New version has a number of useful changes, in particular has been made support of .ISO files, as well as new feature to .CSS files in native format.
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The SoftInform Company announces the release of a new version of its full text information search system SearchInform 1.7 and a price reduction for SearchInform Desktop Standard 1.7 by almost one half. Starting from November 1, the standard version of SearchInform Desktop will cost just $29.95.
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