phraSEarch Tips

Welcome to

phraSEarch$™

A Utility for Helping You Search and Retrieve Information—

Not just Links-to-Information

Tips for Improving Your Search Productivity

phraSEarch$™ was used in intensive off-line searching for many hundreds of hours, by several researchers, prior to its becoming the premier commercial product that is now available to you. As needs were encountered and ideas expressed, many features and operational techniques were incorporated which culminated in the present release. Exploiting the productivity benefits of some of those design features are explained here. This file is kept up-to-date at the phraSEarch$™ website. Visit the website regularly and save the updated files to your \phraSEarch directory (folder). The date of this file is 5/16/2005.

$ The first time you use phraSEarch$™ Tip: Use the pull-down menu >Help>Tutorial for a brief introduction to the search utility. The Tutorial demonstrates the use of all of the major input fields and buttons.

$ The most recent directory structure is remembered, which can reduce overall searching time. Establishing the directory structure can be a time-consuming procedure, when the structure contains thousands of folders. And, frequently, users wish to search on many different words and phrases in that same directory structure. Eliminating the redundant building of directory structures can greatly improve the performance of subsequent searches. Tip: Try to accomplish as many searches as can be foreseen, after having established large directory/sub-directory structures. PhraSEarch will use your forethought to your advantage. Tip: Knowing that the directory structure will be saved, you may increase the context size for your first pass through your data files, decide what is a useful context size to have, and make subsequent passes using your most useful context size.

$ All search parameter sets are saved for re-use. Your productivity can be improved by re-using search parameter sets from your previous sessions. Tip: Use the >File>Reload Search pull-down menu to locate and select previously used search parameter sets.

$ You may customize the search parameter set that is loaded at startup. Tip: Use the >File>Save Search in INI File pull-down menu to save any current search parameter set in the phraSEarch.INI file. On future startups, that set of search parameters will be loaded and ready for use. Use the >File>Save Search in INI File pull-down menu any time you want to save a different search startup parameter set.

$ Use with E-Books: Many E-Books are available on the Internet for personal browsing. The Project Gutenberg website, the Internet's oldest producer of FREE electronic versions of books (e-texts), has over 15,000 E-Books available for free downloading. E-Books that are only available in binary form, and that require license activation (e.g. Adobe e-book and Microsoft e-book) can not supported by any third party software, including phraSEarch. Users of such products are required to purchase premium e-Book titles. Check with the www.phrasearch.com often, as new sources of e-books are listed as they are discovered. There are over 92 million web pages that contain both the words “ebook” and “download.” Include the word “Free,” and there are still over 41 million hits.

$ If the highlighting appears to be working improperly: Consider cutting and pasting the words or phrases from the result file to the “More Phrases to Highlight” edit control. If it does not highlight a phrase, that includes what appear to be spaces, then the problem is most likely with alternate forms of the space character (e.g. non-breaking space, Em space, En space, ¼ Em space,…). The same issue sometimes exists with other alternate character representations in the source document (non-breaking dash, optional dash, Em dash, En dash, etc.). Tip: Entering the phrase as single words will usually solve it.

Please recognize that sometimes, the author of a document (usually .doc or .html) will select part of a word or phrase, change its font size (or make it bold), then select the remaining part, and change its font size (or make it bold) to match the first part. In such cases, the resulting document can have font or other control characters imbedded within the word or phrase, invisible to the reader. Alas, the phraSEarch program cannot find such occurrences of those words or phrases.

$ Use of the “All” check box: This feature is most useful when you want to include additional file types to your search. For example, as new web page formats come into existence, you may include them in your search. One should be careful selecting “All” File Types. This search parameter could cause the phraSEarch program to waste time by searching binary and image files, unsuccessfully. This depends on how the “Types_to_ignore=” parameter is set in the phraSEarch.INI file. The default file types to ignore are: .bmp .exe .gif .inf .jpe .jpg .pdf .png .wmz. Note that un-checking other parameters does not remove them from the file types to be scanned. Such action can only be accomplished by using the “Types_to_ignore=” parameter in the phraSEarch.INI file.

(Advanced:) If you have systems that use text files that have atypical file types (e.g. .csv, .dat, or .xls), using the “ALL” parameter will cause those files to be searched. If you know of large files on your system, which you would not want scanned, you should consider adding them to the “Types_to_ignore=” parameter in the phraSEarch.INI file. Be careful to separate file types with slashes (“/”). It is essential that the first character after the “Types_to_ignore=” be a slash (“/”), since that first character is used as a separator character.

$ On “strange formatting” in the output results file: Since you are in control of the search parameters which define the number of characters to select for the output document, before and after, there always exists a chance that you will select partial formatting control characters from searched .htm, .doc, and .rtf documents. These selected strings, including their (partial) formatting control characters, will then be placed into the resulting HTM file, and may inadvertently become part of the formatting that you view when the results are displayed by your browser. When this happens, you may get strange results. If you want to remove all HTML formatting strings from the documents that are searched, then un-check the Keep HTML Formatting: Check Box. This will not preempt the standard formatting (red highlighting, file names, etc…) in the normal output file. You may also increase or decrease the Characters Before: and Characters After: values in order to avoid or work around control characters from the original documents.

$ Browsers: The phraSEarch system has not been tested with browsers other than the Windows Internet Explorer, which is usually at:

C:/Program Files/Internet Explorer/IEXPLORE.exe

If you wish to specify a different path to your browser, you can change it in the [call] section of the file

C:/ Phrasearch/Phrasearch.INI,

and restart the program. Of course, we would be interested in your comments related to your experiences with other browsers.

$ Windows API Workaround: phraSEarch$™ can search any storage medium that has an address of the form x:\yyy. One user has encountered a situation where the “Browse for directory” button encountered an “Access Denied” message while attempting to access a search directory on a CD-Rom, caused by a limitation of the Windows API. The situation was easily remedied by entering the search path manually. We apologize for any inconvenience this deficiency may cause you. We are researching this incident and will provide a free update to registered users. Please visit our website weekly and watch for a notice that this has been resolved. Thank you.

If you wish to provide a Tip, to recommend changes, or to report errors, we welcome your emailing them to us at:

Thank you for using phraSEarch$™