INDEX-BASED TEXT RETRIEVAL

An index-based text retrieval program indexes all the words in folders and files you designate.  You can index your entire hard drive, a single folder, a project, or a single file.  Although you can index a single file for text retrieval, you will typically index many files.  With an alphabetized index, a text retrieval program provides the following two advantages:

1. You can find words or names in files instantly.  The program does not search through files for your target word.  It searches the index itself.  And since the index is ordered, that is, alphabetized, a search can be done on a million words in under a second.
2. You can keep an overview of your writings and materials.  For example, suppose you have thirty chapters in thirty respective files, along with a few files of notes and research, and a character named John Doe appears in many of the files.  Use the index to find every reference to John Doe in your files.  Did you forget which chapter has John Doe finding the knife he used on the sacrificial yak?  No problem.  Look in your index.  Click on the word "knife."  Then click on one of the files shown to contain "knife" and you can look at the file in either the built-in editor or your selected word processor.

 Finders Keepers^TM  gives you index-based text retrieval for under $30.  This is for writers, not gigantic departments with mainframe-sized information technology.  So, Finders Keepers is friendly to the non-technical, or the technically tired.

FIND INDEXED WORDS 4 WAYS

You can  search 4 ways through the index:  plain text, regular expression, approximate, and sound-alike.  The regular expression method provides a grep-like search of the index.  If you are not familiar with "regular expression" and "grep," don't worry--just use the other methods.  The approximate and sound-alike searches enable you to search the index even when you do not know how to spell a word, or it has been misspelled in the indexed files.  You can view or edit found files 6 different ways.

FIND STUFF WITHOUT INDEXING

Finders Keepers^TM does not have to use the index in order to search.  It can do text searches on any files, folders, or drives that you designate.  And it still provides 4 ways to search the files and 6 ways to view them.  When you search files directly instead of searching a pre-made index, you can save the listed results to a file on disk, along with the word or expression you searched for, the files and folders you searched, and so on.

FOR ADVANCED USERS

Finders Keepers^TM has many features to suit the advanced user, including regular expressions, scores of options, batch mode, built-in binary and text viewers, zip file options, and binary-character expressions.  Found files can be selected for moving, copying, or deleting.  You can choose file extensions to exclude from searches always.  Other exclusions are accomplished by filters for file characteristics, such as date and size.  Replace text in multiple files using regular expressions.  Or disable replace operations if you have kids or novices using your computer.  Save different sets of options to disk for later reloading.

Let Finders Keepers do the search--you do the thinking!^TM