“The dtSearch product line provides over 25 hit-highlighted search options, including forensics-oriented search features.”

The Smart Choice for Text Retrieval® since 1991, dtSearch has provided enterprise and developer text retrieval along with document filters for over 23 years. dtSearch products have received hundreds of excellent case studies and press reviews. The dtSearch product line meets some of the largest-capacity text retrieval needs in the world.

BusinessInterviews.com: What separates you from the competition?

Elizabeth: First on the list would be dtSearch’s broad data support. dtSearch software provides parsing, extraction, conversion and searching of a wide spectrum of data formats. Supported data types encompass databases, static and dynamic web data, popular “Office” formats, compression formats and emails (including the full-text of nested attachments).

A key element of this broad data support is dtSearch’s document filters. Document filters are the current industry name for software that parses file formats, emails and other data. dtSearch uses its own proprietary document filters, and does not rely on a third-party for its data support.

Other features that distinguish the dtSearch product line include dtSearch’s terabyte indexer. dtSearch enterprise and developer products can index over a terabyte of text in a single index, spanning multiple directories, emails and attachments, online data and other databases. The products can create and search any number of indexes. Indexed search time is typically less than a second, even across terabytes of data. And the dtSearch product line offers fast, concurrent, multithreaded searching, with no limit on the number of supported search threads.

The dtSearch product line provides over 25 hit-highlighted search options, including forensics-oriented search features. For international languages, dtSearch products support Unicode, including right-to-left languages, and special Chinese/Japanese/Korean character options. dtSearch products also offer federated searching across any number of directories, emails (with nested attachments), and databases. And dtSearch products support integrated relevancy ranking with highlighted hits across both online and offline data repositories.

Going one step further for developers, the dtSearch Engine supports categorization based on document full-text contents, internal document metadata, database content, or data attributes associated with documents during document indexing. The dtSearch Engine has APIs for other advanced data classification options as well, such as faceted search and full-text and/or fielded data positive and negative variable term weighting.

BusinessInterviews.com: Can you tell our readers about some of the work that you’ve done on developing the dtSearch Case Study pages and why they’re a source of pride?

Elizabeth: The case studies offer a way for us at dtSearch not only to describe sample usages of dtSearch products, but also to promote our customers’ applications. As our case study flyer notes, dtSearch has a customer base dtSearch’s own customers may also want to reach. For example, 3 out of 4 of the “Big 4” accounting firms have dtSearch licenses. 6 out of 7 of the Fortune 500 largest Aerospace and Defense industry companies are dtSearch customers. And dtSearch has distributors worldwide, including coverage on six continents.

BusinessInterviews.com: Can you share how dtSearch is taking the opportunity to promote and thank their customers?

Elizabeth: In addition to the case studies mentioned above, another key way in which we promote our customers is through “custom development work” listings. dtSearch Corp. does not do custom development work itself, and maintains complimentary listings to serve as referrals to companies that do such work, and have experience with dtSearch developer implementations. All listings are completely free-of-charge, and all referrals are free-of-charge. (The only revenue we get at dtSearch Corp. is from our standard licensing of the dtSearch product line.)

BusinessInterviews.com: What are some key ways that dtSearch has changed and evolved since first launching back in 1991?

Elizabeth: The original 1991 dtSearch release ran as a desktop-“only” application. The first few releases of the dtSearch product line did not include OEM or developer API access. In 1995, dtSearch Corp. made available its initial developer version for OEM integration. Launched in 1995, the very first Windows product that embedded the dtSearch Engine had an installed base of over one million users.

Today, the dtSearch Engine for Win & .NET, the dtSearch Engine for Linux and most recently the dtSearch Engine for Android make available dtSearch’s document filters and instant searching for a wide range of Internet, Intranet and other commercial applications. SDKs include native 64-bit and 32-bit C++, Java and .NET APIs.

In addition to the dtSearch Engine, other dtSearch products today include: dtSearch Web with Spider for quickly publishing instantly searchable data to an Internet or Intranet site; dtSearch Network with Spider for instantly searching across a network; dtSearch Desktop with Spider for desktop search; and dtSearch Publish for publishing searchable data to portable media.

BusinessInterviews.com: What does your leadership style look like?

Elizabeth: We regard dtSearch as a dynamic product line, not a static product line. Part of the reason the product line is so dynamic is the nature of text search and retrieval and data support. Every time a major data format has an update, we need to update the dtSearch product line to reflect that format change.

But part of this dynamic nature is also that customers’ search needs evolve. For example, a customer with a classic LAN setup running dtSearch Network license might finds it needs to add Internet or Intranet-access searching, which would be dtSearch Web.

We view our job here as making sure that dtSearch customers are “all set” not only on the day of the original software license, but going forward. That can mean anything from sending new downloads if the customer’s existing downloads “get lost,” to transitioning a customer from one dtSearch product to a completely different dtSearch product.

BusinessInterviews.com: What are some trends in your industry that you’re excited about?

Elizabeth: We welcome the fact that enterprise and developer users increasing expect instant searching “everywhere.” Users expect instant concurrent searching both in each specific application, and across all data repositories at once. It is dtSearch’s goal to continue to meet these “everywhere” search expectations.