Major Full Text Search Improvements

GovOS Cloud Search has implemented a number of improvements to our Full Text Search feature.  Always one of our most exciting search options, we’ve listened to your feedback and added features to make it easier to use, and provides better results.

What is Full Text Search?

For documents recorded by your County Clerk or Recorder, not only is the image of the document provided, but also an index to simplify finding those documents.  Most counties index Grantor and Grantee names, that is who sold the property and who is buying the property, Legal Description, Recorded Date and a few other fields.  Without that index, you’d be forced to look through all the recorded documents one at a time.

Typical search sites allow you to enter a name and see if there are any documents that match.  That’s fine if the indexes are complete and if every name is spelled correctly.  But what if that’s not true?  You run the risk of not finding the document you need.  Or what if the name is John Smith.  In a large county, you may still be faced with looking through hundreds of documents.  Or what if there’s information on the document that isn’t indexed?

Full Text Search runs each document through a proprietary process that pulls the document text from the images.  Then we search that text.  Though it’s not 100% perfect, it’s very close.  And it allows you to search most every word of very document.  You can find information that was not indexed.  Your searches can be much more comprehensive.

We’ve Made Changes

Normally in GovOS Cloud Search, we search for each WORD that you enter.  We look up those words in the index described above.  But for Full Text Search, we now do it differently.  Your feedback suggests that if you enter two words, you generally want to search for both of those words together.  So we default to a PHRASE search.  Instead of “David” and “Johnson”, we search for “David Johnson”.  We describe the changes in detail in this document.

You can still perform a WORD search if that’s what you need.  And that is also discussed in the document above.

Default to Card View

When you perform a search, we generally show you the results in the Table View.  It shows one line listings of all the documents that match.  But now, when you preform a Full Text search, we’ll show you the results in the Card View.

The Table View shows a snippet of the text within the document where your match was found.  You can see at a glance whether this is the document you want to see.  Click on the thumbnail view of the document to see the full-size image.

Image Navigation Controls

Then in the Image View, we’ve added navigation controls to move from one match to the next.

Move through the document, from match to match, quickly and easily.  This is extremely helpful in very large documents, such as Commissioners Court Minutes.

More Improvements Are Coming

We continue to listen to your feedback in an effort to provide the very best search experience possible.  More enhancements to GovOS Cloud Search are underway today and will be released in the weeks and months ahead.