TheBrain vs Evernote vs Personal Wiki

Posted by 22111
Oct 6, 2018 at 06:49 AM

Above: “I think they at one point used a version of dtSearch (at least for Windows)” - this is probably being meant as a quality assertion, while in fact,

dtSearch either is an overpriced piece of crap,

or they very successfully hide its strengths, while obviously not being interested in individual customers. I trialed it again some weeks ago. It indexed “known” file formats, was not able to index file formats “unknown” to it, not even when they were more or less identical to .rtf but not totally identical to .rtf.

I searched for a way to “tell” dtSearch to “grasp” it, more or less; I would have been willing to accept some limitations, like I encounter in FileLocator (not indexing, so searches often taking 20 minutes on a modern and fast pc), where for example I have to search for accented characters not by “é” e.g. but by the corresponding 4-char rtf code (I have macros for the transposition): no way.

In normal circumstances, the above (non-) result would not have been surprising - it’s perfectly similar to e.g. “X1” ‘s and others’ inability to “find” something in any file format they don’t index by default, BUT dtSearch is touted all over the web - and that tries to justify its price, a multiple of e.g. “X1” - as a “forensic” tool, so it’s VERY surprising that it should not be able to search even just for text within files coming with a quite simple ASCII format like similar to .rtf, formats that you can read in any text editor of your choice - nothing “binary” here.

Of course, I looked up the whole manual for some solution for this miss; of course I thought it must be “somewhere”, considering its alleged “forensic” character: nothing.

Then only I kindly contacted their support; I NEVER got the slightest REPLY.

Btw, for about 15,000 bucks or so, when I last time looked it up, you can integrate the then current version of dtSearch into your own software, BUT that software of yours must store its data in a NON-standard format (yes, that’s VERY ironic, considering the problems described above), and then, your integrated dtSearch will ONLY search that NON-standard-formatted data of yours, NOT also any standard-formatted user data, and in practical terms this means that if you write some db-backed outliner, your integrated dtSearch will be able to search within that db, but NOT also search any .txt, .rtf., .docx, .pdf or similar file the user will have linked to within their/your outliner.

Of course, you can do it like UR does it, which replicates the text of external, linked-to files within the db, in order for UR then to do the search upon the text replica within the db, by internal means of the SQLite engine, and this comes with a lot of problems but doesn’t cost UR 15,000 bucks or some… for the same result.

In other words, developers would have to be nuts to buy dtSearch for their software, in all use cases I can imagine, and as for the alleged “forensic” abilities of dtSearch, I didn’t find them, even scrutinizing the manual, and they wouldn’t tell me.

You know, some products (all over the place, not just software) are just marketed by superior pricing, and then the fanboys come along and scream, oh it’s so good! Just recently, Apple’s newest “smartphones”, about 1,700 euro (around 2,000 bucks) apiece, probably even more with VAT higher than 20 p.c. in some countries, and they don’t even give head.