Re: how to make a gigantic doc set easily searchable?

["Pro TechWriter" <pro -dot- techwriter -at- gmail -dot- com>]

Good question...

I will be watching this topic with interest. Our documents are in a
transitional phase. Some are already converted to HTML in WebHelp. Other
department's documents are linked in the WebHelp file as PDFs.

If there is a search utility that will work with PDFs as well as HTML, I'd
like to know about it too. It will be a while until I can covert the PDFs
into HTML, and in the meantime, Webhelp does not search inside the PDFs (as
far as I can tell, anyway).

And, by the way, I've seen lots of research that supports that experienced
and highly-technical PC users search first in online documents, then look
for something in a TOC or index last, especially if they grew up using
computers and the Internet. So, don't automatically assume that a great TOC
and index means that a really good search engine is not needed--not true :-)
Of course, I am providing as many paths to the documents that I can,
including a TOC arranged by topic, department, and other criteria (date,
state, and so on), but a really great search capability is also necessary.

Ciao,
Pro -dot- Techwriter -at- gmail -dot- com

On 9/22/06, Samantha Slate <samantha -dot- slate -at- gmail -dot- com> wrote: