In article <[log in to unmask]>, dated Sun, 11
Oct 1998 at 00:08:24, Adrian Midgley <[log in to unmask]>
writes
>[log in to unmask],Net wrote at 13:02 on 10/10/98
>about "Re: [bhia-g] Sherlock":
>-----------------------------
>>Copernic does soemthing similar to that. Alta Vista's 'search my
>>computer' can also index your entire drive the same way the search
>>engine works. It takes ages if you have large data. Not sure if it
>>can then search online as well. Copernic does.
>Interesting.
>So one could have a single file or small group of files for each
>patient, and yet the speed with which they could be found for
>disease registers etc would be as good as with an RDBMS. Hmm
>
It is certainly very fast because all the files are pre-indexed.
In addition, I attach my reply to Ahmad's comments which I had posted to
the bhia-g list.
It [AltaVista Discovery] can take a long time to index but this is not a
problem. It indexes in background and you can tune the "speed" such that
it doesn't appreciably affect any foreground process. At a guess I have
something just under 2 Gigabytes of data and it takes around 25 minutes
with the 'speed' set at around 6 on a scale 1 to 10 (266MHz PentiumII).
It indexes every word in text, WP and a number of other format files
which is probably why it takes so long. I can happily connect to the
Internet without any overruns while the Index process is running.
Typically you reindex once every 24 hours (fully configurable automatic
scheduling) although it indexes cached web documents in real time.
You can do web searches as well but not in the same pass as a local
search. As with most software there is always room for improvement and
it has a few idiosyncrasies but I have found it invaluable. It's free as
well!
Chris
--
Chris Salter (Vice Chairman) Lincolnshire Post-Polio Network
Registered Charity No. 1064177
<URL:http://www.zynet.co.uk/ott/polio/lincolnshire/>
Web Site & Vice Chairman Email: [log in to unmask]
Honorary Secretary Email: [log in to unmask]
Member of the British Healthcare Internet Association
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