Searching Multiple Data Sources; Concurrent Multithreaded Search
- dtSearch products support integrated relevancy ranking with highlighted hits across both online and offline data repositories.
- Federated searching span any number of directories, emails (with nested attachments), and databases.
- The Spider adds local and remote, static and dynamic online content to a search. The Spider can index sites to any level of depth, with support for public and private or secure online content, including log-ins and forms-based authentication.
- dtSearch products offer efficient multithreaded searching, with no limit on the number of concurrent search threads.
Basic Search Types
- Natural language searching lets you enter a “plain English” (or any other international language) unstructured search request.
- Phrase searching
finds phrases like: due process of law.
- Boolean operators
like and/or/not can join words and phrases: due
process of law and not (equal protection or
civil rights).
- Proximity searching
finds a word or phrase within “n” words
of another word or phrase: apple pie w/38
peach cobbler.
- Directed
proximity searching
finds a word or phrase “n” words
before another word or phrase: apple
pie pre/38 peach cobbler.
- Positional search finds words of phrases "n" words towards the beginning or end of a file: apple w/5 xfirstword or apple w/5 xlastword
- Metadata-specific searching (multiple options)
- Phonic searching
finds words that sound alike, like Smythe in
a search for Smith.
- Stemming finds
variations on endings, like applies, applied, applying in
a search for apply.
- Numeric range
searching finds any number between two numbers,
such as between 6 and 36.
- Macro capabilities
make it easy to include frequently used items
in a search request.
- Wildcard support
allows ? to hold a single letter place, and
* to hold multiple letter places: apple*
and not appl?sauce.
- Regular expressions support provides a way to search for combinations of characters.
- Digit character matching enables searching for patterns of numbers.
- Unicode support allows for searching hundreds of international languages, including support for “right to left” languages and special options for Asian character handling.
- Multicolor hit-highlighting search options (up to 10 highlight colors)
- Emoji search

- International language / Unicode search
See Forensics and Other Advanced Search for:
Fuzzy Searching
- Fuzzy
searching uses a proprietary algorithm to find
search terms even if they are misspelled.
- Search
fuzziness adjusts from 0 to 10 so you can fine-tune
fuzziness to the level of OCR or typographical
errors in your files.
- A
search for alphabet with a fuzziness
of 1 would find alphaqet; with a fuzziness
of 4, it would find both alphaqet and alpkaqet.
- Fuzziness
is not built into the index, so you can vary
fuzziness at the time of each search.
Concept / Synonym / Thesaurus Searching
- Concept
searching lets you look for fast and
find quick, speedy, etc.
- dtSearch
offers variable levels of automatic synonym
expansion based on a comprehensive semantic
network of the English language.
- You
can also add your own thesaurus terms.
- For example, Frank and Jones would not be synonyms covered by the built-in semantic network. But if you are working on the Frank Jones case, you may want to make them synonyms for purposes of your case. The same principle applies to technical jargon like airbags and SRS.
Relevancy-Ranking
See separate Relevancy-Ranking topic
Metadata
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- dtSearch products can index and search metadata in all supported file types and databases: MS Access, Word, PowerPoint, OneNote, other “Office” files, compression formats (RAR, ZIP, GZIP, TAR), XBASE, CSV, HTML, XML/XSL, PDF, PDF portfolio, ASP.NET, CMS, PHP, SharePoint, etc.
- dtSearch products can also index and search metadata in emails such as Outlook/Exchange (PST/OST/MSG) and Thunderbird (MBOX/EML), including metadata in both emails and in attachments (even recursively embedded attachments). More email options
- Detection and support of metadata in all supported data types is automatic.
- In addition to locating general search terms in metadata, dtSearch products can also limit searching to specific metadata: (Author contains John Smith) and (Subject contains turbine generators).
- For XML data, dtSearch supports hierarchical metadata structures, including both metadata and attributes, enabling highly refined nested metadata queries.
- Variable term weighting can also apply to metadata: (description:5 contains (apple and pear)) or (author:2 contains smith).
- See also Faceted Search and Data Classification.
Combining Search Types
- Nearly
all search types are combinable.
- You can make your search request as complex as you want — see Search Tips at right.
Special Forensics Search Options
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