Search

The Java program for performing full-text searches is called DocSearch.jar and is located in the search directory of this DVD. To launch the search engine, simply change to the search directory and type java -jar DocSearch.jar.

This DVD comes with the DocSearcher search engine, which was developed by John Brown. The tool was released under the GPL and uses the Lucene and POI Apache Open Source libraries, as well as PDF box. DocSearcher requires a Java 2 runtime (version 1.5 or higher). You can type java -version to find out which version you have installed (assuming java is in your search path).

For your convenience, we also include a pair of scripts for launching DocSearcher in Linux or Windows. To start the search engine from the desktop, navigate to the top directory of the DVD and launch search.sh (for Linux) or search.bat (for Windows).

DocSearcher

DocSearcher is a search tool. It uses the Open Source Lucene and POI Apache APIs as well as the Open Source PDF Box API to provide searching capabilities for HTML Document HTML, MS Word Document MS Word, MS Excel Document MS Excel, RTF Document RTF, PDF Document PDF, OpenOffice Document OpenOffice (and Star Office) Documents, and text documents. Other file formats are currently not supported.

To perform a search you simply type in the keywords or phrases you are looking for and click the search button.

The search results will be presented in a Table. You can click on files as you would in a standard web browser.

To get back to your search results you can click on the Search Results Icon ().

There are 4 types of searches you can perform with DocSearcher: Keyword, Phrase, Boolean, and Wild Card. The example queries below describe each of these types of searches:

Examples Searches	What They Do
summer vacation -with the "keywords" radio button selected	Finds documents with the keywords "summer" and "vacation" This type of search is called a keyword search.
summer vacation -with the "phrase" radio button selected	Finds documents with the phrase "summer vacation" This type of search is called a phrase search.
"john smith" -"john brown"	Finds documents with the "john smith" but excludes document with "john brown" This type of search is called a boolean search.
virtu*	Finds documents with words that start with virtu... For example virtuous, virtue, virtuosity, etc... This type of search is called a wild card search.