Hello fuciek,
I have found several products which seem to be what you are looking
for.
1. Find in Context costs $29.95.
http://www.findincontext.com/findincontext/ You can buy it online or
by telephone/fax, and a free trial version can be downloaded from the
web site.
Here are some extracts from the product description:
“flexible & powerful search tool for electronic texts. It makes it
very fast and easy to extract any information from big collections of
electronic documentation, texts and downloaded websites. You can
search the files located in any folder on the hard drive of your own
Windows computer (or other computers connected to yours via a LAN) for
any keywords, and within seconds you'll have the most relevant
paragraphs shown to you in your browser.”
“easy to learn and easy to use… In addition to the context (NEAR)
search method, which is native to the program, it also supports AND
and OR operators, search for exact phrases, whole words or substrings,
and exclusions (NOT operator)… You can also use such parameters as
file size, dates of modification, creation or last access, or file
type.”
“does not use any separate index databases, you always search the
actual files with all the latest additions and changes”
“The built-in context viewer shows you immediately what you have found
and allows you to read the whole file without having to open it with
other programs”
“Find In Context's native search mode is NEAR… You can fine-tune your
searches by adjusting the size of the context window. By reducing the
size of the context window, you make the search more restrictive, i.e.
the words must be closer to each other to produce a hit. By increasing
the window, you allow for more hits to be found. Similarly, the NOT
operator… also looks at the closeness of the words to your target.
You can exclude hits from the final results based on how far the
"unwanted" words are located. If they are in the same context window
as the words you want to find, the hit is discarded. However, if the
unwanted words are far from the what appears to be a relevant hit, the
hit is included in the final results.”
2. Data Detective PC Search. Version 1.1 costs $8.95 for the Netscape
version and $9.95 for the Internet Explorer version. Version 3 costs
$34.95 for the standalone version, and $33.95 for the Netscape
version. It supports searches on more file formats than version 1.1
A trial version of V. 3 is available for download.
http://www.appletsite.com/index.html
This differs from Find in Context in that you have to get it to index
the documents first.
“integrates information indexing AND search and retrieval, allowing
the user to search for specific words or phrases (complex Boolean,
proximity and wildcard searches are also available) in any file that
resides in any directory or drive”
3. If you want a totally free program, WanyWord v. 4.00 is described
as a TextSearcher with BOOLEAN and NEAR Operators
http://home4.inet.tele.dk/jensguld/
“WanyWord can find text within any kind of file (except ZIP files and
other compressed files), but it can only show ASCII, RTF and HTM text
and it can show only text. It is however possible to start an
appropiate viewer/editor from within WanyWord and WanyWord understands
OLE.”
The information on the web site is rather sparse.
Search strategy: Windows software Boolean proximity search files |
