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Old 11-19-2006, 07:05 PM
igoldsmid igoldsmid is online now
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Join Date: 11-18-2004
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it seems rather odd to be asking why highlighting is needed - isn't it obvious? It's certainly obvious to the best desktop search vendors, Copernic, X1, Exalead, DTSearch, etc.. Ones that don't provide it i.e. Windows Desktop Search, and Google (although you can get add ons for your firefox browser to highlight google search results), I hardly ever use, because of that shortcoming.

I guess its the difference between people who perhaps are more visually oriented - as highlighting, especially where there are multiple occurrences of search terms in lengthy documents - makes it vastly easier and quicker to see at a glance what you are looking for. For me, and I expect many even most others, highlighting search terms is well, basically essential. And what about when you have searched for occurrences of multiple terms - if you use the Handyfind method you have to perform separate secondary searches for each term in each document! - that's brain dead to me... Plus you can't use handyfind in PDF's I think.... (Some search vendors solve the pdf eccentricity by convert pdf's into text, and then highlighting the search result text - though others have found a way perhaps through a pdf api, to highlight search results actually in the actual pdf itself).


Kinook's push back of this request reminds me of a similar push back they made regarding how they originally thought that just being able to search on key words - as opposed to phrases, was enough - which I also thought was very odd and rather focused on their own way or working perhaps, and not necessarily what works for others.
The notion I believe expressed by Kinook, that once you know a particular document contains your search term(s), you are done, makes no sense to me at all. Often search terms need to be seen in the context of specific sentences, or paragraphs to determine their meaning, and thus whether they were actually the ones you were looking for or not - right!? Indeed, this only points to the issue that is driving the whole semantic web initiative! People can't find what they are looking for - they get way too many results based on key word searches - they haven't got the time to wade through all those hits. So the real solution to this is semantic search using formal ontologies like rdf-s and especially OWL (w3C.org) - but that's unlikely to be the remit of UltraRecall - if ever, or not for many releases yet well into the future?

With respect: Given the name of the product - UltraRecall - there's not yet enough 'ultrarecall' about it if/when having a huge information store, and not having state-of-the-art search available with all the attendant bell and whistles. And indeed, for whatever reason of lack of brain cells on my behalf or whatever, the nested logic used in advanced searching may be ultimately powerful, but its incredibly disorienting to figure out how to construct the indenting with 'and's' and 'or's' - especially when you have more than two or three query lines - and this is so for me even though I am used to constructing complex boolean searches in the 'traditional' manner with no problem - yet the UltraRecall advanced search mechanism drives me nuts! Perhaps its easier for people who do programming all day long - but for me, not.


I think UltraRecall provides a wealth of functionality - but it is definitely weak in the search area. I feel it needs to be at least as as good as the best free desktop search products - that should be its foundation - and then all the other great stuff it provides is what you pay for - the cream on the cake so to speak.. Otherwise, in some sense, why put all your stuff into a proprietary database, and now you can't use top notch desktop search tools like X1 to find anything you want from tens of thousands of documents in seconds... ?
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