The SSSleuth™ Search Engine

The SSSleuth™ Search Engine is one of the fastest and powerful full-text search and retrieval engines available. It supports queries formulated naturally in all European languages, including English, French, Spanish, Russian, etc. as well as Turkish, Arabic, Hebrew, Latin, and many others. The engine can be used in document management and imaging systems on your personal computer, Local Area Network of your company as well as in Web crawlers: it has a built-in mechanism allowing to access, modify and perform simultaneous searches in the same collection of documents from multiple computers within the Local Area Network of your company (LAN). Apart from searching, the engine builds automatic document summaries by selecting and highlighting the most essential paragraphs in each file you include in Virtual Search Folders. You will be amazed of its fast indexing and search speed, accuracy, flexibility, and the ease with which this engine can be integrated into your software projects.

The Engine efficiently manages both large and small text databases; a trial version of the engine supports up to 5,000 files. SSSleuth™ is designed with flexibility and efficiency in mind. We hope these efforts pay off as you integrate SSSleuth™ into your software projects and applications.

The Engine has been realized as three pairs of dynamic-link libraries:

  • SSSleuth.dll and SSSleuthMultiThread.dll,
  • SSS32.dll and SSS32MultiThread.dll, and also,
  • SSSum.dll and SSSumMultiThread.dll.

    The libraries function under any 32-bit Windows platform including Windows 98, ME, NT, 2000, XP, 2003, and Vista. Some of the SSSleuth™ components (KT Filters) require Windows XP/2003/Vista or later versions for extracting textual contents from Microsoft Office files (i.e., MS Word, Excel, and Power Point documents). If you are going to include such files in SSSleuth™ Virtual Folders and perform searches in them, it is strongly recommended that you install SSSleuth under XP, 2003, Vista or later versions of MS Windows.

    The Engine supports a large variety of file types, including HTM/HTML, Rich Text (RTF), MS Word (DOC), Excel (XLS), PowerPoint (PPT), Adobe PDF, Help (HLP), plain and Unicode text files (TXT), XML files, and some others. Before indexing each file, SSSleuth™ Engine extracts its textual contents by selecting and applying an appropriate KT Text Filter. The API to KT Filters is open, and to make SSSleuth™ process additional file types, you can create your own filters and include them into the list of applicable ones for all or a particular Virtual Search Folder(s). More information about KT Filters is available on the Kryloff Web site at http://www.kryltech.com/filters.htm, and also in the example projects uncd2txt.c, file2file.cpp, file2mem.cpp, mem2mem.cpp.

    The engine is a component of the entire Subject Search Sleuth™ package, which consists of:

  • SSSleuth™ Administrator,
  • SSSleuth™ Client application,
  • SSSleuth™ Language Specifier,
  • SSSleuth™ Index Packer,
  • SSSleuth™ Search Engine (described in this file), and
  • A number of sample applications and fragments of source code for software developers, which demonstrate the use of the Application Program Interface to the SSSleuth™ Search Engine.

    See also: The Kryloff Text Filters, Data Summarization, Data Scanning, and Data Categorization technologies. The API to the majority of these technologies is provided via the SSSleuth™ Search Engine.

    The trial version of the SSSleuth™ Engine has some functional limitations and restrictions. In particular, it supports no more than 5,000 files in its Virtual Search Folders. If you use the trial version of SSSleuth™ and have not purchased a registered version yet, you may do it now by clicking this link. Upon purchase, you will be provided with a full-featured version of the SSSleuth™ Search Engine plus the entire source code of the SSSleuth™ Administrator, SSSleuth™ Client, and SSSleuth™ Packer utilities.

    Functions and procedures exported by the SSSleuth™ Search Engine dynamic-link libraries.

    All functions of the API to SSSleuth™ are grouped according to their functionality:

  • Virtual Search Folder manipulation routines (creating, opening, closing, deleting);
  • Retrieving contents of Virtual Search Folders (accessing documents included);
  • File indexing;
  • File searching;
  • Scanning of documents and highlighting paragraphs that match one's queries;
  • Automatic composing of summary, precis, and style of documents from Virtual Search Folders;
  • Excluding documents from Virtual Search Folders;
  • Packing index files;
  • Extracting textual contents from different types of files (text filtering);
  • Creating language dictionaries and retrieving information about the language in which documents from Virtual Folders are written;
  • Auxiliary functions.

    Detailed descriptions of all SSSleuth™ functions are provided in the following C++ headers and export libraries, C# classes, Borland Delphi units, Borland Development Studio modules, Visual Basic, and other files both for Win32 and .NET platforms in the folder: "Sample projects\Common".

    Access permission required for SSSleuth™ components.

  • All utilities which use the SSSleuth™ Search Engine including the SSSleuth™ Administrator and Client applications, require the full read-and-write access to Virtual Search Folders, in which SSSleuth™ keeps index files.
  • The Engine itself along with all utilities that use it, require the read-only access to source files being searched and included in Virtual Folders.
  • Similar, the engine requires the read-only access to KT Filters and any other files that are kept outside the Virtual Folder.

    Note: SSSleuth™ may function in a special mode, which allows searching in files that have been burned on CD-ROM along with their index files. In this mode it is enough to provide the engine with the read-only access to Virtual Folders, source documents, KT Text filters, and the rest of SSSleuth™ files.

    SSSleuth™ and Subject Search Sleuth™ are trademarks of Kryloff Technologies, Inc.