dtSearch 7.0

   Developer: dtsearch Corp.
    Official site: www .dtsearch .com
    Price: $199
    Distribution package size: 23.1 Mb

A product of dtSearch Corp., dtSearch Desktop with a built-in dtSearch Spider can index and search not only files on a user computer, but also Web nodes (at preset depth), local network resources. It can also use external indexes created on other computers. As was to be expected, dtSearch recognizes various character sets, including Cyrillic, as well as a number of file formats, such as .doc, .xls, .rtf, .pdf, .html and so on. It should be noted that the full text search application is equipped with the ability to search data in databases on the whole and by contents of specific database fields in particular.

In addition to the conventional search in "natural language" or by means of formal queries, dtSearch search engine sports some other types of searching: with account of morphology, fuzzy (implying possible errors and misprints), phonetic (with account of similar sounding words) and synonymous search. However, they are all promised abilities. It should be noted, though, that no discrepancies with the declared functions have been discovered.

The test 20 gigabytes of information have been indexed by dtSearch Desktop7.0 within 6 hours 13 minutes, resulting in a 7.9 Gb index for the purposes of subsequent search.

As regards documents search per se, the full text search application has revealed no blunders. The same proved to be true with morphology and fuzzy search. The information retrieval system properly found all required documents (though with a slight pause - after all, we are talking 20 gigabytes) both by a simple one word query and when using a couple of paragraphs from a document as the key phrase. It should be noted, though, that when searching by a large text fragment (consisting of several dozens of words) the system would "freeze" for a while before reporting the result.

The strengths of  dtSearch Desktop 7.0	The weaknesses of dtSearch Desktop 7.0
+ searching with account of morphology + searching with account of synonyms + fuzzy search + phonetic search + search within databases (via ODBC) + support of Outlook messages + support of various character sets + work in the local network + indexing  Web pagesat preset depth	- inability to connect to various sources of information  (besides DBMS) and Outlook e-mail - low speed of searching by key phrase over 50 words