Re: Zyindex ( non zywrite question)

[Norman Bauman nbauman@xxxxxxxx]

I haven't used Lotus Magellan (yet; I just downloaded it from that IBM web
site) so I can't compare them. I didn't realize Magellan had an indexed
search.

(You know what an index is, right? It's a big file that you create from
your original text, and it lets you search your text much faster with
pointers, rather than reading through every file like a XyWrite search.)

dtSearch has an indexed search. It can find all the files with a particular
keyword and display the file names in a window. Then you have to click on
the files to open them, and click again on the search button to find the
actual text you're looking for. The downside is that the dtSearch index can
get very big, especially for my email files.

In my experience, the fancy boolean searches aren't too useful. All I want
is to find a keyword, or sometimes a few keywords, and any of the search
programs can do that. A lot of the time I use the XyWrite 3.55 directory
search instead of dtSearch; it's one of the hot keys on my keyboard. I
download newspaper clippings as ASCII text into a directory, and I search
through that with ZTree, which can also kludge a boolean search.

The one thing I learned about search programs is that a simple program is
usually all you need. If Magellan works for you, the only reason for trying
dtSearch is curiosity.

At 10:53 AM 10/20/04 -0400, M.W. Poirier wrote:
>
>
> Can you compare dtsearch with Lotus Magellan? I've been using
> Magellan for years and it seems to do a good job of indexing.
> Mind you, if one is allergic to DOS, then it may not be accept-
> able.
>
> M.W. Poirier
>------
>On Wed, 20 Oct 2004, Norman Bauman wrote:
>
>> P.S. the good news is that when I use dtSearch to index my XyWrite files on
>> a modern PC (even my 1998 Pentium) it only takes 20 minutes, not all night.
>>
>> P.P.S. If you use dtSearch, you have to delete or at least compress the
>> old index file every so often, before you build a new index. I didn't think
>> of doing that, and the index files just grew and grew until they took up my
>> entire hard drive. I was sure I'd have to buy a new computer until I
>> examined my files in a shell program and saw those 10MB index files.
>>
>> P.P.P.S. I wrote an article about text search programs for Law Office
>> Computing years ago, which is why I know about ZyIndex and dtSearch. You
>> can read it on my web site.

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Norman Bauman
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New York, NY 10019
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Alternate address: nbauman@xxxxxxxx
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