searching woes

[igoldsmid]

Although seaching in UR has some incredibly powerful features, some aspects of it are a REAL DRAG. For example - having got an initial hit list of documents that contain the desired term(s) and/or attributes - and especially where one is looking for terms in the item detail or notes, one has to then perform another search to find each term within each item detail and/or note. To do that you have to invoke the little windows-explorer-like window, then find each term one at a time.

The first efficiency, frustration-reducing thing would be to provide a search mechanism embedded in the item detail and item notes panes - with at least the absolute minimum functionality of the existing pop up windowlet. But ideally this-embedded-in-a-toolbar-search-mechanism would also contain a highlighting button, and even a search term selection property, such that when there were multiple search terms involved you could select one or more of them to highlight. This then is functionality kinda-like we've already had on google toolbars and the-like on IE & Firefox - indeed Firefox has an extension that puts a search box in the status bar which is very basic but it makes for a lot of efficiency in searching within long web-pages..

[kinook]

Originally posted by igoldsmid
The first efficiency, frustration-reducing thing would be to provide a search mechanism embedded in the item detail and item notes panes - with at least the absolute minimum functionality of the existing pop up windowlet.
Here's what I use for this:
http://www.handykeys.com/

It's a free app that adds Firefox-style "Find as you type" functionality to all IE browser windows and rich edit controls, including the internal UR browser and text editor.


But ideally this-embedded-in-a-toolbar-search-mechanism would also contain a highlighting button, and even a search term selection property, such that when there were multiple search terms involved you could select one or more of them to highlight. This then is functionality kinda-like we've already had on google toolbars and the-like on IE & Firefox - indeed Firefox has an extension that puts a search box in the status bar which is very basic but it makes for a lot of efficiency in searching within long web-pages..
This is on our list. Due to the many document types that can be stored in UR, this is not so simple. Another complication with highlighting search terms in the text editor is that the user can also highlight text there (it's not read-only like a browser).

[dspady]

Has this issue been resolved yet. I also am frustrated that one cannot highlight the search result in the item pane.

[igoldsmid]

Also I have to say that UltraRecall search is quite bad at finding strings of words - - lets say I just pasted that aforementioned phrase of 16 words into a text item, and then into quick search... I have found that almost every time I search for a complex of words (NOT a phase search), i.e. Word 1, and Word 2, and Word 3 etc... that UR does not find anything....

Since a lot of my need for searching involves longish strings of words, and/or phrases and UR doesn't really accomodate these successfully, I have stopped using UR, even though the rest of the application is quite superb.

So I would like to see UR come up to the standard of products like InfoSelect, WhizFolders, and AskSam for searching.

And I would like to see UR implement internal linking to include building links to editor positions (anchors) in text items, along with the ability to copy and paste links to Items in the tree into the text area, so that it would be possible to create like a "Home Page" with potentially many Hyperlinks for navigational purposes - something like a web page.


Thanks,

[kinook]

The phrase "I also am frustrated that one cannot highlight the search result in the item pane." contains two words which are (by default) in the list of keyword exclusions: 'the' and 'that'. A quick search normally searches on keywords only, so it won't match since those words aren't keyworded. It probably does make sense for UR to also exclude excluded keywords entered in a quick search from the actual search (I guess we didn't anticipate users typing in long search phrases verbatim but instead to just enter meaningful words). For now, the options are:
1) Don't include non-keyworded words in the quick search (for instance, typing 'frustrated cannot highlight search result' would find the item)
2) Remove all words from the keyword exclusion list (Tools | Keyword Exclusions); it will also be necessary to re-sync an existing item with that text to re-keyword the content, but then a quick search for the entire phrase will find it.
3) Perform an advanced search of Item Text matches wildcard *the phrase* (if the phrase is in the detail text) or (Item) matches wildcard *the phrase* (if the phrase is in an attribute).

Our goal was to make quick searches very, well, quick, but also to balance that with keeping the size of the database as small as possible, so the compromise we made was to exclude the most common words from being indexed. The side effect is that quick searches containing those common words don't get matched. Until now, we didn't realize this was a problem, but we'll fix that.

Highlighting of search results and wiki linking are also still on our list for a future release.

[kinook]

There actually was logic to exclude excluded keywords from quick searches, but it was buggy. This is fixed in the test build of v2.0b at http://www.kinook.com/Download/UltraRecallProBeta.exe

[kinook]

Highlighting of matching item text in search results is available in UR v4.
http://www.kinook.com/UltraRecall/Manual/searchdialog.htm

Stepping to the next/previous search match is also available.
http://www.kinook.com/UltraRecall/Manual/gomenu.htm