Subject Search Scanner™ is a full-text search utility, which scans within files, e-mail messages and archives on your local, network, CD-ROM, DVD and flash drives looking for a given word or phrase (see also: SSScanner™ CD Edition below). As SSScanner™ searches for your query, it shows the directory path to the files that match it most of all.

The application uses the intelligent Subject Search™ method, which matches your search phrase with the text being searched even if the corresponding text fragment and your search phrase are not exactly the same, some of the words are swapped, not present or spelling varies; searches can be done in any of nearly 40 languages supported. The product provides each of its findings with a relevancy score shown as a percentage; this helps you to judge whether a particular file does or does not actually contain information of your interest. SSScanner™ processes files of any format, including text files, documents written under MS Word, HTML, PDF, RTF, HLP formats as well as binary or even executable ones!

Beginning from version 4.5, Kryloff Technologies issues a special edition of SSScanner™ for CD: SSScanner™ CD Edition. This product has been developed to let your customers search in contents of documents and files that you are burning and distributing on CD-ROM devices. Being based on the source code of the regular SSScanner™ utility, CD Edition inherits all of its benefits such as, rich multi-language capabilities, intelligent "Subject Search" technique, easy-to-use product interface, etc. Unlike the regular SSScanner™ utility, CD Edition does not require any installation on your customer's machines: after being burnt on your CD's along with your documents and data files, this product is ready to search in them right after the user inserts your CD's in the CD-ROM drive. Please, do not mix up SSScanner™ and SSScanner™ CD Edition: even though they look alike, these are different products. If you want to use both, you should purchase two licenses, one for SSScanner™ and another one -- for SSScanner™ CD Edition.

This section is written with regards to the appearance of Windows Vista^®, into which Miscrosoft has embedded some full-text search functionality. SSScanner™ is fully compatible with this platform; furthermore, installing SSScanner™ on Windows Vista^®, which looks wonderful indeed is strongly recommended. However, according to the opinion of Sergey Kryloff, president of Kryloff Technologies and the team of his experts, the full-text search functionality in Windows Vista^® is poor and unreliable. Corresponding explanations and examples are provided below.

Microsoft states: "Windows Mail includes the Search box, which makes it easy to find specific e-mail and newsgroup messages. Using the Search box, you can quickly filter your message list so that it only shows messages containing specific words, characters, or e-mail addresses.".
Sounds good. However, when you start Windows Mail^® (former, Outlook Express^®), it welcomes you by a message, which tells about new search features, and which amongst other words, definitely contains "search" (as well as "searching", "searchers", etc.). But, after typing in just the only word "search" for the query, all messages including the welcome one disappear, and displayed is a picture stating "0 messages", and "no items match your search":

Note, that when you enter other words (such as, "Microsoft"), the welcome message does not get filtered. The list of similar cases may be prolonged; for example, when you type in "e-mail" for the query, Windows Mail selects some messages, which do not contain this word ...

Now please, look at the SSScanner™ findings after scanning the same messages:

SSScanner™ has found even 4 quotations in a single file! (the number of quotes SSScanner™ can extract from the same file is controllable)

Let us go further and see what Windows Vista^® can find in regular files. Unfortunately, not too much either: even in English different forms of the same word (such as, "possibility" and "possibilities") do not get matched to each other nor our experts have discovered a single slice of what Microsoft calls, "natural language searches".

As an example, Windows Vista^® finds nothing for a simple query "phrase structure":


As for SSScanner™, it easily matches the query "phrase structure" to "structuring your phrase", and after scanning exactly the same folder displays:


The table below compares key full-text search features in Windows Vista^® and SSScanner™:

Feature	Windows Vista®	SSScanner™
Selecting different forms of search terms	does not support	supports
Reporting with paragraphs that match search queries	does not support	supports
Estimating items found with relevancy scores	does not support	supports
Support of queries formulated in natural form	poor	strong
Multi-language support	not present	rich
Customizing to a particular area (medicine, physics, ...)	absent	supported by vendor upon request
The ability to build index files	present	not present*
Searching in results of previous searches	supports	supports
Saving and restoring results of searches	supports partially	supports fully

^* - on an average PC SSScanner™ processes hundreds of e-mail messages and several megabytes of file data per a second. For even faster searches, index files are supported by SSSleuth™, one more product of Kryloff Technologies.

The SSScanner™ ability to generate reports with quotations from original files that answer your questions is completely unique and powerful. Below is a sample report which gives you some idea of what the product does for you. Note, that quoted are phrases, which do not bodily match the example search query "Making content available for offline viewing"; some search terms are swapped, altered, and even not obligatory present in the original text:

As you can see on the picture, SSScanner is capable of searching in documents of multiple types such as, MS Word, HTML, TXT, etc. To extract from and then scan textual information from all of these and other file types, SSScanner™ is shipped with special plug-ins called, "KT Text Filters". As soon as Kryloff Technologies develops a new Text Filter, it adds it to the latest version of SSScanner™ and makes it available for free downloading. Look at the Free Stuff page to check out if you already have all the filters that are currently available.

Additionally, advanced users can configure SSScanner™ to search through any files! Look at the Creating Text Filters page for details.