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Document Management: Full Text Searching for Documents in the Library - FAQ


How can I search using Full Text Search?
By default, the simple search form searches the library using the full text search engine. There are two locations where you will find the simple search screen. The first is by clicking on the 'Search & Smart Folders' node on the library tree. The simple search form that appears allows users to search the contents of the entire library using the full text search engine. The second is the search field in the top right hand corner of a document folder. The below screen shot shows the simple search field (highlighted) from the 'Search & Smart Folders' node of the library tree in the FileHold Desktop application.

Simple Document Search Field

 

What operators can I use with full text search?
The following operators can be used when searching using full text search;

Operator What it does and examples of use
AND

To find documents that include both search terms simply add an uppercase AND between the terms. By default words that are separated with a space will be automatically joined by an AND operator.

For example, to search for documents that contain the words London and Paris users would enter the search phrase

or

OR

To find documents that include either of two search terms, add an uppercase OR between the terms. For example, to search for sports either golf or tennis users would enter the search phrase


* (wildcard) A wildcard search is a text string with asterisks used to represent one or more letters. For example, suppose that you are looking for someone named Anderson, but you are aware that there could be several spellings of this name, such as Andersen, Anderssen, or Andersson. To do a search that would find these other spellings, you could would enter the search string.
"exact phrase"

To find documents that use an exact phrase enclose the search in quotes. Suppose you want to search the library for documents on Tiger Woods. If you search using

You will return all documents in the library that contain the word Tiger (ie a large jungle cat) AND Woods (the forest) and some documents that contain both words. By searching using exact phrase searching

You would return only documents that contain 'Tiger Woods' in a phrase and your returns would be on the golfer.


What about the Stemming, Fuzzy, Synonym and Phonic search features when I am conducting a full text search?
Yes. FileHold supports all of these search features. Here are descriptions of each.

  1. Stemming - Finds grammatical variations on endings, like applies, applied, applying in a search for apply.
  2. Fuzzy searching - Finds words even if they are misspelled. A search for alphabet with a fuzziness of 1 would also find alphaqet. With a fuzziness of 3, the same search would find both alphaqet and alpkaqet.
  3. Phonic searching - Finds words that sound alike, like Smythe in a search for Smith.
  4. Synonym expansion - Finds word synonyms using a comprehensive English language thesaurus


    5. Because these search methods can impact search performance the ability to search using Fuzzy, Synonym and Phonic searching is a global setting as configured by the library administrators of the FileHold system. Please contact your library administrator to see if your system is configured to use these document searching features. Use the following link for more information on how to configure the FileHold search engine.


What does the 'Relevance' field mean in the search results?
The relevance value (expressed as a percentage) is an approximation of how close the document is to the search criteria the user searched for.



Does the full text search engine search for EVERY word I entry in the query. What about really common words like 'the' or 'at' ?
FileHold ignores common words or characters as they tend to slow down searches without improving the quality of the results.By default the following words, if entered into the search string are passed as part of the query to the search engine. [ I , a , about , an , are , as , at , be , by , com , de , en, for , from, how , in , is , it , la , of , on , that, the , this, to , was , what , when, where , who , will , with, und, the, ]



When are documents indexed by the full text search engine?
Documents are indexed by the full text search engine on a schedule as set by the library administrator. This schedule can be set as frequently (every minute) or infrequently (once a week and anywhere in between) as required to support search activities of users. You will not be able to locate documents until such time as a document is indexed by the engine.

 

What user activities will result in the full text search engine to be updated for a document?
The following user activities trigger the full text index to be updated for a document;

  1. New document(s) or a new version of a document is added to the library (both the documents Metadata values and the document content will be indexed).
  2. Metadata values that are associated with a document are edited (the new Metadata values are added, the old values are removed).
  3. A document is deleted from the library (both Metadata Values and content index entries associated with the document shall be removed).

 

 

 

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