Full text search

Christos Georgiou

22 Mar 2023

Through our interactions with customers, it has become abundantly clear that relying solely on conventional search methods for locating quality library documents is far from the optimal approach. The crux of the matter lies in the diverse formats that quality departments typically deal with, with the majority of these documents originating from regulatory bodies and being in PDF format.

The conventional route typically involves reformatting these documents within our software to make their content searchable. However, this comes at the cost of losing the ability to store and search the original industry-standard documents. Alternatively, limiting search capabilities, while preserving the original documents, poses its own set of challenges. These limitations significantly impede the efficient retrieval of crucial documents and references, often making them more elusive, if not entirely unattainable.

This predicament is particularly pronounced when we consider the sheer volume of documents that most quality departments have to manage. The magnitude of this challenge cannot be overstated, as thousands of documents require organization, accessibility, and retrieval on a regular basis. In such an environment, maintaining the integrity of the original documents while ensuring efficient searchability is paramount.

Hence, it has become evident that we must rethink and enhance our document management searching to strike a balance between preserving the authenticity of industry-standard documents and ensuring their easy retrieval. We employed innovative solutions to extract and index the full body of text from as many as 200 different readable formats. We applied algorithms to route the user to the best possible document showing a snippet of the information as it is with the document, no matter what readable format the original document is.

The benefits to the user for implementing a full-text search for our document library module are:

Enhanced Search Precision: Full-text search allows the masters to search for documents based on the actual content within them, not just metadata or keywords. This means the masters can find documents that contain specific words or phrases, even if those terms aren't part of the document's title or description.
Time Savings: The Master can quickly locate relevant documents without the need to browse through long lists or hierarchies. This saves significant time and effort, especially in large document repositories.
Comprehensive Results: Full-text search provides comprehensive results, ensuring that no relevant documents are missed. QHSE managers can get a holistic view of all documents that contain the searched terms.
Improved Decision-Making: Access to a wide array of documents via full-text search empowers decision-makers to make informed choices based on the most up-to-date and relevant information.
Cross-Document Insights: QHSE Managers can identify patterns, trends, or correlations across multiple documents by searching for common terms or phrases. This can lead to valuable insights that might otherwise go unnoticed.
Quick Retrieval of Specific Information: Researchers, professionals, and knowledge workers can swiftly find specific facts, data points, or references within documents, making their work more efficient.
Content Reuse: Full-text search simplifies the process of finding and reusing content from existing documents.
Compliance and Legal Requirements: The shipping Industry have compliance and regulatory requirements for document retention and retrieval. Full-text search makes it easier to meet these obligations by ensuring that relevant documents can be located promptly.

In today's data-driven and information-centric world, the ability to perform full-text searches within quality document libraries is not just a convenience but a strategic advantage. It empowers organizations and individuals to harness the full potential of their document libraries, turning them into valuable knowledge assets.