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1-800-IT-FINDS
(1-800-483-4637)
301-263-0731
fax 301-263-0781
info@dtsearch.com
Contact
dtSearch |
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| dtSearch Case Study — Strategic
Insight |
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| Mutual
Fund Managers Representing over $3 Trillion Worth of Mutual
Fund Assets Use dtSearch Text Retrieval Engine on MS IIS
To Do Mutual Fund Research |
dtSearch
“delivers state-of-the-art power and
stability.”
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Begun in 1986, Strategic Insight supports
the research efforts of over 125 mutual fund companies
who collectively oversee 85% of mutual fund industry
assets (approximately $5.5 trillion). Strategic
Insight's clients also include service, distribution,
and finance organizations, as well as non-U.S.-based
advisors. Strategic Insight provides a range of
services to address the information and research
needs of its clients in their strategy, marketing,
distribution, pricing, planning, and product development
processes.
Strategic Insight's latest offering
is Fund Filing™, a Web-based mutual fund
electronic document retrieval system. Designed
to address the need for mutual fund document research
in a time-saving way, Fund Filing offers multiple
options for full-text and other searches across
the entire library of mutual fund and variable
annuity prospectuses, annual reports, proxies,
and other SEC-filed documents.
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“dtSearch
co-exists with IIS very well and has an easy
to follow object-model.”
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Under the Hood
"We set out to offer full-text searching of
all SEC documents filed by all mutual fund companies,"
says Hanna Bayoud, the manager of Fund Filing. The
current total represents about 20 gigabytes of material.
To handle the material on the host site, Mr. Bayoud
chose to use Microsoft Server with Internet Information
Service as the platform.
The criteria that Mr. Bayoud needed in a full-text
search engine were as follows:
• full compatibility with IIS
• fast full-text searching of 20 gigabytes
or more of text
• a multitude of search options for precision
searching
• display of retrieved documents with the relevant
search terms highlighted
• easy maintenance in connection with an ever-changing
and expanding database
The full-text search engine matching these requirements
was the dtSearch Text Retrieval Engine. The chief
developer, Max Rottersman, explains: "dtSearch
co-exists with IIS very well and has an easy to
follow object-model. It delivers state-of-the-art
power and stability." The dtSearch Engine can
be called from any ASP page to index or perform
searching. "dtSearch Text Retrieval Engine
makes searching of Fund Filings' database quick,
easy and thoroughly comprehensive," adds Mr.
Rottersman.
For searching, "dtSearch has every full-text
feature I can imagine," says Mr. Rottersman.
Text search options in dtSearch products number
over two dozen, and include highly sophisticated
capabilities such as fuzzy searching adjustable
from 1 to 10, multiple level concept searching,
natural language with precision relevancy-ranking,
and much more.
dtSearch's searching algorithms allow it to handle
many levels of complexity. A single search request
can contain multiple boolean, proximity, numeric
range, phonic, fuzzy, synonym, etc., elements. "Many
clients probably only use 10% of dtSearch's search
features," says Mr. Rottersman. After a search,
dtSearch Web displays retrieved Web pages with the
hits highlighted inside popular browsers. This makes
it easy for users to go straight to the relevant
part of a document containing a search term. Many
of these documents are quite long, and users might
otherwise have to comb through a document all day
to find a search term.
From a development perspective, the dtSearch Text
Retrieval Engine makes maintenance of a continually
updating searchable database easy. "We created
a separate Visual Basic application to automatically
add additional filings to the document database,"
says Mr. Rottersman. "dtSearch can quickly
determine which documents are not in the index and
add, or delete, them."
To further make it easy to continually update the
searchable mutual funds database, the documents
themselves can remain in the original format that
the SEC provides. This is possible because the dtSearch
Text Retrieval Engine provides on-the-fly conversion
of documents to HTML from other popular file formats.
So Fund Filing can leave all files right in their
original text format.
"dtSearch offers many solutions including stand-alone
versions and self-contained Web toolkits. They all
work with the same indexes making it easy to standardize,"
says Mr. Rottersman. Finally, "dtSearch tech
support is great though one can usually figure out
anything from examining its log files, something
we always forget to do!"
www.fundfiling.com
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