Full-text search / Full-text index within a DMS

Free text search is a search strategy in which users put a keyword into the search field, and the search engine searches the indexed content for all textually evaluable stuff and returns results. In addition to faulty spellings, the error-tolerant free-text search may analyze synonyms and grammatical justifications for other spellings. Traditionally, a free text search simply looks for complete matches of the search phrase in the indexed content. As in the Guided Text Search, there is no meaningful interpretation of the search word. As a result, the free text search returns a hit list rather than a recommendation list.

Users who can define their buying requirements or know the product name, for example, find a product more rapidly with free text search than with other search methods such as filter search or category navigation. Users who are unable to clarify or express their needs, on the other hand, have a slim probability of locating acceptable products via the free text search.

Apart from other search methods some Document Management Systems also offer a full-text search function. This search method is especially intuitive because it enables the user to find documents on the basis of any random term within the document's text.

The archiving software's Optical Character recognition (OCR), that composes the database of search keywords - the so-called full-text index - is crucial for the quality of the full-text search. The full-text search also requires a lot of computing power and other server recources when processing large numbers of documents.

Alternatively, some archiving systems also offer a semantic full-text search or a tag search, both of which use significantly less resources.

Summing up, the keypoints are:

• Search through all texts
• Spelling Errors are considered
• Other Search-Operators are possible

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