There are a number of different options you can select that make the index more useful, but for the moment you can opt for the defaults. This is your command centre for everything from creating an index to searching an index. Once is has finished run the dtSearchDesktop. Installation and first useĪll you have to do is download the 30-day evaluation of dtSearch With Spider and start the installer. But before looking at the basic structure of the API and building our first 'hello world' applications let's take a quick look at getting started with dtSearch. You could simply use the dtSearch console to find documents but in most cases it is preferable to build it into an app of your own - and this is where the API comes in. It makes it seem ease and direct and you can see exactly what is going on. The big problem is that most tools make creating an index a difficult task. In most cases you only have to scan the entire collection of files once and then add any new files to the index. The index is typically much smaller than the collection of documents and much faster to search. The most intelligent way of doing the job is to scan all of the documents and build an index of the words that they contain.

The dumb way to do this is search the entire collection of documents each time.

Put simply, search is about finding documents based on their content. This is a difficult question because there are many answers depending on your exact circumstances. Now I'm investigating dtSearch and I can tell you now, it's a refreshing return to simplicity.īut see if you agree as I explain how easy it is to get started with it as a system component and as an API. They tend to be over complex and simply not worth the effort.

I've tried alternatives such as Windows Search 4.0 and Solr but there are problems with both. Since Vista, Window's desktop search has been difficult to use, difficult to configure and difficult to manage. I also have a great interest in desktop search - or rather how how it generally doesn't work under Windows. It has been on our fix list for a long time but so far no one has had the courage to decide on the technology to use to replace it. You may have noticed that I Programmer's search facility is, to put it bluntly, not very good. We take a look at how to implement search via an object-oriented API using dtSearch and C#.

Search is an important part of desktop and web based applications but it can be made to seem more difficult than needs be.

Dtsearch guide