SearchInform

Starting the description of SearchInform from its interface may not be such a good idea. It’s better to start with the installation process, to be more precise from a small detail of that process: you can’t install the program without being connected to the Internet. The thing is, before you can run the program it requires a (free) user registration and sends all inserted data to the server. The developers probably took these precautions to prevent program piracy, though it didn’t help to make the installation process more convenient. 

The program interface is carried out considering all the common rules, although at first glance it looks a bit bulky.  When first using the program, interface seems too complicated, as sometimes it’s hard to remember in which menu or on which tab the needed option is. Although after first steps this interface doesn’t look that awfully complex anymore. The best thing to do would be to read help first.

Once you got a general grasp of the interface, you can start creating an index. The process is quite simple and even to an untrained eye indexing speed looks significantly higher that other search engines reviewed here. The numbers show that SearchInform is twice as fast as dtSearch and iSYS in indexing speed! The program took an exceptionally short 3 hours and 17 minutes to index 20 gigabytes. The size of the newly created index also wasn’t too large – 4.4 Gb, a 100 megabytes less that Google Desktop Search.

Aside from the standard files and folders the program also indexes electronic mail, databases (!) and other outside sources (DMS, CRM) as well as all of the file attributes. At the very beginning of indexing there’s an option of specifying the dictionary you want to use for the stemming search. Having created the index, when you try to conduct a trial document search, you might be confused since there are two types of search and you need to pick which one you need. As it’s already been mentioned above, the main thing is to read the help file in advance — then everything is clear. The program really can perform two types of search, that is phrase search and search for document with similar to the query content.