Searching via the server

DEVONthink Tips
1

Hello!

Just got a fancy dancy ScanSnap for xmas. While their software is good, I was pointed to DEVONThink because you support the scanner, and have a nice post-import dialog.

I was playing with the server (as we’d use the Pro as a scan station and search it via the laptops) but the search seems broken in 2.0pb1.

  1. The search box in the upper right of the web page does nothing.

  2. Using simple search, if I search for “recycle” it finds nothing, but if I search for “recycled” it finds “recycled.” Partial matches seem broken, but do work fine in DT2 itself.

Are these PB bugs, or am I missing something?

2

When viewing databases being “broadcast” by the Server in DT Pro Office 2.0, click on the Loupe (magnifying glass) symbol. The display changes to the search view.

In my database, with All selected, I performed this search:

recycl* NEAR/1 (tire OR tires)

That picked up “recycle” OR “recycled” OR “recycling” OR “recyclable” when separated by one word or less from “tire” OR “tires”. I got 6 results.

When I modified the proximity operator to NEAR/50, I got 10 results.

When I changed the search to recycl* AND (tire OR tires) I got 25 results, which included documents in which the terms were found and proximity is not considered.

How about that? :slight_smile:

3

ok a bit geeky, but very powerful :slight_smile:

I knew about the loupe, I was just curious why the box labeled search didn’t do anything (and still doesn’t)

4

The new operators and syntax are really very simple, but allow you to pose questions to the database that are much like you would think if you were asking it questions in natural language.

I used the NEAR operator to illustrate the fact that if you are looking for documents about tire recycling, the most relevant search results are likely those in which the terms occur in close proximity, rather than widely separated in the text. That WILDCARD asterisk comes in handy when there are several stem-based variants of a term, so that you don’t have to spell them all out in the query.

Some things will change before final release. But as to those new search operators and syntax, it’s not a bad idea to start thinking geeky. That approach will allow you to pose questions to your database that could not be asked in DEVONthink 1. :slight_smile: