AZARDI 32 Gets Full Text Indexed Search Across Multiple Books
9 October 2014
AZARDI has a significant new power feature. Full text indexed search across all books loaded in AZARDI. This feature has been included primarily for exploring academic, research, corporate, training and education content.
AZARDI 32 has been released. This is a significant new feature upgrade. AZARDI 32 features:
- Full text indexed search across multiple books.
- Powerful Library filtering on title, author and more.
The "Search Multiple Books" feature request has been made by a number of universities and other users who have found AZARDI the best reading system for large collections of academic content.
This significant feature puts AZARDI in a class of its own among ePub2/3 reading systems. Indexed search is currently only available on the desktop versions of AZARDI due to the CPU processing limitations of tablets. We are working on that.
Indexed Search Features
User Controlled Indexing
Indexing significantly increases the storage size consumed by an ePub. But not all content needs to be indexed all the time. For this reason we have made it easy for the reader to index and de-index books as required
User Selected Indexing. Books are not indexed by default. The reader has to explicitly select the Index option when a book is uploaded, or to index an already uploaded book.
User Selected De-Indexing. Any book or combination of books can be de-indexed at any time.
Index Search Tools
All the standard advanced search tools are instantly available making it easy to get to just the content required. All standard punctuation is ignored, all searches are case insensitive and all searches are UTF8 so they work across multiple languages.
AND. If you use multiple terms for search they are AND joined by default. You never need to type AND into a search. If you do it will search for the word "and". This will affect search results.
OR. You can use OR as an optional search extender.
NOT. NOT puts the breaks on the results. and
"Phrase". Put your search string in quotes and get refined. Eg: "azardi is great"
NEAR. This is a real search power tool. azardi/5 great with find all search occurences where AZARDI is within five words of great.
Suffix*. Suffix searches allow you to target multiple forms of a search string.
You can create complex searchs using any combination of these search terms to create precision search across a very large content corpus.
Volume Testing
We have currently tested up to indexing 500 books. The search results remain instant and the testing goes on. Our target is 1000 books on an average performance Windows laptop. We currently recommend indexing books in batches of around 50 or so depending on the "power" of your workstation or laptop.
Multi-Language Search
Thanks to the wonder that is Unicode, and in particular UTF8 any language and script can be searched. We have done limited testing on Chinese, Korean, Japanese, Nepali, Hindi, Malayalam, Telugu, Thai, Arabic and Hebrew.
We have no yet included a Pinyin or Indic script ASCII convertor. If there is demand we will look at that in a future release.
Indexing Document Granularity
AZARDI does not try and join sections/chapters together to create a seamless novel "book" reading experience. Sections are all stored separately and displayed as required. This was done so every document section stands alone with Javascript and CSS on-load events... and also to be a target for full text search.
Search first of all gives you a list of books the search term was found in, and a count of how many times it was found.
When you search for a term the first result is a list of books that have the search term and the number of results in that book.
You can now click on any title and see a list of sections in that book that contain the search result. AZARDI Search lets you quickly get to the content you are searching. Every section in your ePubs is indexed independently. Therefore the first search result granularity is any frontmatter, body or backmatter section in your books.
Click on a book and get the list of sections (with Section titles) the search term was found in. It displays a search context extract of the first term in each section.
You can then select any section of primary interest, go directly to the content and navigate through the search results with the dedicated search navigation tool.
All search results are highlighted section by section and can be navigated by the Search navigation tools (top left corner).
Watch for the Videos
As with any significant and game-changing feature of this nature, it is important to let users explore and give feedback before going crazy on the feature map. We will be putting a series of video tutorials online shortly to allow readers to get the best from AZARDI.
Watch the Tutorial Video