Highlighting found keywords in document

[eno]

After serching for an info item
for the found keywords or phrase to be highlighted within the info item.

It seems this is urgantly needed and many would find it usefull.

If the highlighting colour could be customised that would be wonderfull.

[kinook]

Pardon me for being dense, but why, exactly? Since this has been requested by others too, I must be missing something, but for me, the purpose of searching for an item is to locate the item and then read or edit its content, not to look at the matching word(s) within the item (I already know they're there since it matched the search). I can quickly identify if a search result is relevant from its icon, title, create date, etc. In the rare case that I do need to see the context of the actual search term, I can find it quickly via Ctrl+F or HandyFind [1] (for HTML and RTF documents).

How do other applications that support this implement it for all the possible document types, or are only certain document formats (which?) supported? Does it render exactly like it would be displayed in its native application for any document type or just use some textual approximation? Does it show it read-only or editable? If editable, how does it distinguish between "highlighted to show the search match" and actual hilighting that might be in the document, and what happens when you start editing? If read-only, how is it then edited? What sort of hilighting (if any) is done for an advanced type of search? Detailed answers would be helpful in understanding the need and implementing it in a useful manner. Thanks.

[1] http://www.handykeys.com/

[eno]

I have a lot of long documents that I often need to find a subject within the text, yes I can find the document but then it sometimes takes a while to find the portion I want.

I was using AskSam but have started using Ultra Recall because of features lacking in asksam that Ultra Recall does have, but the one thing it did have that I found very good was the highlighting of text that I had seached for.

Ultra Recall can be used in so many ways and yes you or some others may not need to find a particular portion within large documents, but for me and I suspect other too this could speed finding information up no end.

On the internet I use Roboform and that has a search that can highlight any given search on any web page, if I am researching something which often are in large documents this can save me lots of time.

Ultra Recall to me is about saving time and I like the prgram enough after testing it to buy the pro version, I do have data bases that all the info items are very small or they are like you said and when I have found the item that is good enough.

But to be able to find particular phrases or words by highlighting on the long documents which I do use for refrence and research would help me a lot.

I think doctors, students, solicitors, business people of all sorts and private users could all find this very usefull.

If the highlighting were cusomisable so that either the background or the text could be set to a colour there would be no conflicts.

For me it is text documents that I need this for and so far I have manadged mostly using quick search, most of my documents I do want to edit.

For people who do not want or need highlighting within a document surely it could have a switch in the options setup

I have only had your program a short while but have used it a lot and am still finding new uses and ways of using it.

I am not criticising but making a suggestion to in my eyes make your program even better and in doing so helping myself. ;-)

[kinook]

But how would hilighting in a long document help you find it faster than Ctrl+F, since you would have to scan and scroll until you get to the hilighted word?

[eno]

Ahh - Ctrl+F - Now thats a good one ;-)

That does what I want I just didn't see it even in your reply it didnt click with me, I should have put my glasses on 8-(

PROBLEM SOLVED ! - and I like your program even more now.

Thanks, I will have to read the manual through a few times to see what else I have missed.

I did install HandyFind and yes it is usefull - so again thanks

A satisfied customer.

[wordmuse]

Thanks for the tip about handyfind. Very nice.

Bal

[wordmuse]

One more thing on this and then I'll leave this alone.

I put together a quick example page:
http://www.wealthcountry.com/test/kinook.htm

As you'll see, multiple highlighting is incredibly powerful and easy to use. I'm not saying it's easy to implement in UR, which is your call.

But anyone who uses tabulated data, or who has to sift through large amounts of text will find this useful. It was one of the coolest things about Firefox, and it seems like it ought to be intuitively easy to understand the usage, but maybe that's just me.

Anyway - it's not a make or break for UR, and handyfind is a neat utility, but it would be very nice if some future iteration of UR could implement highlights as shown in my example.

Kind Regards,
Bal

[igoldsmid]

it seems rather odd to be asking why highlighting is needed - isn't it obvious? It's certainly obvious to the best desktop search vendors, Copernic, X1, Exalead, DTSearch, etc.. Ones that don't provide it i.e. Windows Desktop Search, and Google (although you can get add ons for your firefox browser to highlight google search results), I hardly ever use, because of that shortcoming.

I guess its the difference between people who perhaps are more visually oriented - as highlighting, especially where there are multiple occurrences of search terms in lengthy documents - makes it vastly easier and quicker to see at a glance what you are looking for. For me, and I expect many even most others, highlighting search terms is well, basically essential. And what about when you have searched for occurrences of multiple terms - if you use the Handyfind method you have to perform separate secondary searches for each term in each document! - that's brain dead to me... Plus you can't use handyfind in PDF's I think.... (Some search vendors solve the pdf eccentricity by convert pdf's into text, and then highlighting the search result text - though others have found a way perhaps through a pdf api, to highlight search results actually in the actual pdf itself).


Kinook's push back of this request reminds me of a similar push back they made regarding how they originally thought that just being able to search on key words - as opposed to phrases, was enough - which I also thought was very odd and rather focused on their own way or working perhaps, and not necessarily what works for others.
The notion I believe expressed by Kinook, that once you know a particular document contains your search term(s), you are done, makes no sense to me at all. Often search terms need to be seen in the context of specific sentences, or paragraphs to determine their meaning, and thus whether they were actually the ones you were looking for or not - right!? Indeed, this only points to the issue that is driving the whole semantic web initiative! People can't find what they are looking for - they get way too many results based on key word searches - they haven't got the time to wade through all those hits. So the real solution to this is semantic search using formal ontologies like rdf-s and especially OWL (w3C.org) - but that's unlikely to be the remit of UltraRecall - if ever, or not for many releases yet well into the future?

With respect: Given the name of the product - UltraRecall - there's not yet enough 'ultrarecall' about it if/when having a huge information store, and not having state-of-the-art search available with all the attendant bell and whistles. And indeed, for whatever reason of lack of brain cells on my behalf or whatever, the nested logic used in advanced searching may be ultimately powerful, but its incredibly disorienting to figure out how to construct the indenting with 'and's' and 'or's' - especially when you have more than two or three query lines - and this is so for me even though I am used to constructing complex boolean searches in the 'traditional' manner with no problem - yet the UltraRecall advanced search mechanism drives me nuts! Perhaps its easier for people who do programming all day long - but for me, not.


I think UltraRecall provides a wealth of functionality - but it is definitely weak in the search area. I feel it needs to be at least as as good as the best free desktop search products - that should be its foundation - and then all the other great stuff it provides is what you pay for - the cream on the cake so to speak.. Otherwise, in some sense, why put all your stuff into a proprietary database, and now you can't use top notch desktop search tools like X1 to find anything you want from tens of thousands of documents in seconds... ?

[eno]

I have just realised why I would like highlighting as a one step process when quick searching - yes I can use Ctrl+F or HandyFind

But

Today I had to find some records in my email database that has years of emails that I have now put into it.

I knew by searching on some keywords (that I could remenber), it would narrow my search but I was still left with a few hundred emails to look through (this out of many thousands).

If from my initial quick search it had highlighted the word or phrase that I had initially searched for, it would have been very easy to flick though those emails glancing at the pre-highlighted words in context with the paragraph they were in and I would have found much quicker what I was trying to find.

What would also speed thing up on other searches I do would be the choice to have a simple search bar that I could use from the menu area.

I am very pleased with ultra recall so what I am asking for is things that would just make my use of it easier, other people may or may not have the same wishes, but I suspect they do.

[eno]

Originally Posted by eno

After serching for an info item
for the found keywords or phrase to be highlighted within the info item.

It seems this is urgantly needed and many would find it usefull.

If the highlighting colour could be customised that would be wonderfull.

We have had highlighting for some time now, Which is very good, but is there a way to customise the highlight or text colour of the found word?

Or have I missed something?

[kinook]

The highliight color for search will be the last color that was used when highlighting text in an item.

[eno]

Originally Posted by kinook

The highliight color for search will be the last color that was used when highlighting text in an item.

Thank you for a very quick and helpful reply.

I wondered why I was getting a highlight that was Black and blocked the word out now I know.