The way that you set up IDOL depends on your content, and on what you want to be able to do.
IDOL can manage your data for a variety of scenarios and purposes, but you can improve the quality of results, and the speed of responses, by considering some key factors.
Before you start to configure IDOL, look at a sample of documents that are representative of what you want to index and search.
Repositories. IDOL has a variety of connectors that can extract data from a wide range of repositories. In general, you need one connector for each type of repository.
Types of Documents. With IDOL KeyView, connectors can extract text, metadata, and subfiles from hundreds of file types. Different types of document generally contain different content, so you must decide whether and how to store each type of document.
Before you index your data, look at the files in your repositories, and identify the information that you want to extract.
Connectors can index specific folders, databases, or file types, and ignore others. If you are indexing content from a Web site, you might want to target a specific folder or subdomain (for example a community forum that contains customer feedback and comments).
After you have identified the files that you want to extract from your repositories, consider what information is contained in each file. In addition to the main content, consider metadata and subfiles.
The information that you can extract is likely to differ between repositories and file types. Some files (for example plain text files), might contain a lot of content but relatively little metadata. Others might have a large amount of metadata that you can index. See Example: Index E-mails.
After you have analyzed your content, you must decide how you want to use it. Consider:
blocks of text that you want to search using words or concepts. See Basic Queries.
information that you want to search for in its entirety. See Field Search.
information that you want to use as a specific set of filters (such as a particular product feature). See Parametric Search .
general information that you want to use to filter results (for example, you can allow users to narrow the results by a date, or search in a result set for a partial author name). See Field Search and Parametric Search .
content that you want to be able to extract particularly useful values from. See Eduction.
content that you do not want to store. You can prevent IDOL Server from indexing a set of fields, if they contain information that you do not want to search or retrieve. See CantHaveFieldCSVs.
You have to configure many of these functions before you index your data, so it is worth spending some time looking at your documents to decide what you want to be able to do.
All documents consist of multiple fields, which you can search and display separately. It is important to configure IDOL to handle particular fields in certain ways. See the main topic on Fields.
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