FileHold search engine configuration
Use the Search Engine settings to configure how you want the search feature to return data. The Search settings page has been split into basic and advanced settings. It is recommended that the advanced search settings be left at their default values as changing the search engine settings can dramatically affect system search performance. If you make any changes please note the previous settings and document your changes. Please read carefully all examples within this area. We recommend populating and using the system for a period of time before making major adjustments. This is accessible by only System administrators.
Instead of enabling fuzzy, phonic, stemming, or synonym searching globally, you can perform these types of searches "on the fly" in a regular search. See Search Request Types for more information.
To configure search engine settings
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In the Web Client, go to Administration Panel > System Configuration > Settings > Search.
- In the Error Email Addresses area, select the groups of users that will receive a daily email with a summary of search engine warnings and errors: System Administrators, Library Administrators, Administrators (both library and system administrators), or No alerts.
- In the Type of Errors to Send area, select the type of events that administrators want to be notified about:
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Both Un-indexed and Index Errors
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None
- Select one of the following options for Enable raw full text engine queries for role. A raw query is a search that will not pre-process the query before sending it to the dtSearch engine. It is up to the user to provide the necessary dtSearch query syntax and avoid any FileHold specific search index content. If the user provides other FTS search criteria, the raw option will be included in parenthesis and joined with an AND. See Advanced Searches for more information on raw queries.
- System administrators – This is the default.
- Senior library administrators and higher
- Library administrators and higher
- Cabinet administrators and higher
- All users
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In order to log the searches conducted by users, select the User search logging check box. Since FileHold does not restrict how users conduct their searches, this log can help the FileHold support team and customers pinpoint any search issues. This should only be enabled when troubleshooting for searches needs to occur. See Search Performance Log for more information on logging searches.
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In the “Maximum number of search results” area, enter the number of files to return from a search. This is the maximum number of search results that are displayed in the search view. The default number is 5,000.
You may wish to temporarily increase this number if you are planning to export the results for a report. You should return the value to its normal setting to ensure server and system performance is optimal. If you are creating a custom program using the API you can easily get all documents from the system without changing this value if you include the document id in your search criteria. For example, in addition to the normal search criteria you are using include a criteria where the document id is greater than the highest document id in the previous search. You will get all the documents from the system if you continue to request batches of documents in this way until less documents are returned than the maximum configured amount.
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In the “Maximum number of intermediate search results” area, enter the number of to be assessed for relevance when a full text search is combined with a database search. When there is a combination of full text and database search terms in a single search there are two separate result sets that must be combined to a single result set. This is where the stop searching after value is used. This is the number of results that are considered in this intermediate step. The actual results returned to the end user will be the records with the highest relevance to up to the maximum of the number of files to return. The default for stop searching after is 10,000.
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In the Search Timeout area, enter the time, in seconds, to terminate a search. This limits users' ability to overload the server with unnecessarily complex searches. The default is 60 seconds.
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Click
to view the advanced search settings. - In the Stemmed Search area, select the check box if you want to use stemmed searching. Stemming finds other grammatical forms of the words in your search request. For example, a search for “applies” would also find “apply”.
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In the Phonic Search area, select the check box if you want to use phonetically similar words. For example, Smith and Smythe.
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In the Fuzzy Search Setting, select the check box if you want to enable fuzzy searching. Select a fuzzy search level from 1 to 10. Fuzzy search sifts through scanning and typographical errors. For example, a search for “alphabet” would find “alphaqet” with a fuzzy level of 1. A fuzzy level of 4 would find both “alphaqet” and “alpkaqet.” Fuzzy search requires additional computational overhead so it is suggested to keep this setting less than 5 unless the documents in the library and metadata have frequent spelling errors. The recommended level is 2.
We do not recommend enabling stemmed, phonic, fuzzy, nor synonym searching for the vast majority of customers. They may change your search results wildly and should only be enabled in consultation with FileHold support.
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In the Synonym Searching area, select the check boxes to search for synonyms or related words.
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In the Hyphen Searching area, you can set how hyphen characters are indexed and searched. Select from the following options:
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Hyphen as ignore — Does not index the hyphen. For example, “first-class” will be indexed as “firstclass”.
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Hyphen as a hyphen — Indexes the hyphen. For example, “first-class” will be indexed as “first-class”.
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Hyphen as a space — Separates the hyphenated words into two words. For example, “first-class” will be indexed as “first” and “class”.
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Hyphen all — Indexes a hyphen as all three of the above options. For example, "first-class" will be indexed as "firstclass", "first-class", as the two words "first" and "class", and the phrase "first class".
Changing hyphen settings will cause re-initialization of the full text search index and schedule re-indexing of all documents. This should be done only after work hours as the search system will not function while this occurs.
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In the Accent Support area, select the check box if you want indexing to be sensitive to accents. An accent-sensitive index converts characters, wherever possible, to a “base” character which is the letter A to Z or 0 to 9. Generally, accent-insensitive indexes are easier to use because they ensure that a document will be found even if the user omitted an accent when typing a word. In accent-sensitive indexes, each letter is converted to lower case where possible but otherwise characters re-indexed using their Unicode values. For example, e and é would be considered different letters and a search would not find the other.
Changing accent settings will cause re-initialization of the full text search index and schedule re-indexing of all documents. This should be done only after work hours as the search system will not function while this occurs. You generally do not need to use accent settings when managing English language documents.
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In the Initialize Index area, click
to start full-text search indexing.
Use this feature only when absolutely necessary. This will wipe out the existing Full Text Search collection and create a queue for all documents in the system to be re-indexed in the Microsoft SQL Databases. On large collections, this may also interfere with documents being added to the system by users. This task takes considerable time and is only recommended if there are significant reasons for re-indexing the entire system. We recommend this be run over the weekend. Before doing this you should ensure an IT Administrator is available in case server changes are needed. The scheduled task runs this process, and an IT server administrator can disable this scheduled task (Update FTS index) during business hours. This process may take minutes or hours or longer - it depends on whether you have tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands or millions of documents in your collection. Contact FileHold support if you have any questions. For rebuilding the search index, see Rebuilding the Full Text Search Index.
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Click
to update the search engine settings. - Click to return to the basic search settings.
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Click
to revert the settings to their default values.
Most of the settings on this page impact the performance of full text searching only and do not impact the searching using the advanced search metadata string searches.