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Search Your Files

There are already file search programs available for Windows but they usually leave a lot to be desired. For example, the built-in "Find files or folders" will find files containing a word (or phrase) but it returns only a list of those files, with no information regarding the context of the occurrence of that word. Worse, it will also return files which contain words of which the search word is a part. So, for example, if you search for "cat" you will also get files containing "catch", "scatter", "implicate", etc.

It would be handy to have a search tool like Google, which returns not only file names (as hotlinks) but also displays a few sections of text from the files in which the search word is contained. And one would like to search not only for single words but also for all words in a set of words, or any word in that set, or the exact phrase. And it would also be useful to be able to search for words which begin with a word segment, such as "compar" (so as to return files containing any of "compare", "comparison" and "comparative").

All this is available in a new product from Hermetic Systems called 'Hermetic File Search'. This is for searching any collection of HTML, XML or other text or text-like files (if in a top folder and subfolders) on hard disk, CD-ROM, etc., for keywords: any word, all words or an exact phrase.

Hermetic File Search consists of two modules, an index module which indexes all words in all files in the search domain and a search module which searches those files. The index module is capable of indexing a hierarchy of over 1000 HTML files, totalling over 50 MB, and containing over 100,000 different words. Even with that number of different words the search module returns results in a few seconds. The results are displayed by the software and can also be displayed in a page in your default web browser, with links to the files containing the words searched for.

The search module may be used with "temporary" index files, in the sense that you might just want to search a particular set of HTML (or other text-like files) during an hour or so. If there are fewer than 100 files that you wish to search, containing fewer than 10,000 different words, then the index module will create an index file in a couple of minutes and you can then search those files with results reported in your browser. When finished you can delete the index file.

Hermetic File Search requires only 3 MB for installation and runs under any version of Windows from 95 to XP. A full description (and download links for the trial version) can be found at: http://www.hermetic.ch/hfs/hfs.htm

A single-user license for the index module of Hermetic File Search costs US$49.00 (39 euro or 25 pounds sterling). Purchase of a license for the index module will get you a free user license for the search module.

Hermetic Systems has been publishing software since 1997 and currently has over 16 Windows programs in diverse areas: encryption, calendar date conversion, steganography, graphics file conversion, mathematical software, web authoring tools and more. The home page is at: http://www.hermetic.ch/