The searchit Release Log

The current release includes a comprehensive upgrade of the underlying Docker and Docker Compose environments. The update ensures improved stability, security and performance of container-based applications. The upgrade also brings new features and optimizations that enable more efficient container management and deployment.

This searchit update brings the underlying Ansible deployment tools up to date. The upgrade includes improvements in the automation and orchestration of deployment processes, resulting in faster and more reliable deployment of applications. New modules and extended functionalities also offer more flexibility and customization options for IT administrators.

This release extends the operating system compatibility for searchit to Debian 12 and Ubuntu 24. By supporting these latest operating system versions, users will benefit from the latest security updates, performance enhancements and advanced features that these operating systems offer. In this way, we ensure that searchit runs optimally on the current platforms and that future developments are taken into account.

This release includes a bugfix that improves the display of annotations for video objects. This update ensures that all annotations, especially for video content, are displayed correctly and in a user-friendly way.

In the current version of searchit, the editing of text notes has been expanded to include new additional fields. Users can now add and edit notes and additional information at index or item level. These new fields allow for more detailed and versatile documentation and recording of information, which is immediately searchable as usual. Users with activated Archive Plugin with YouTube module can now also make notes and descriptions of the archived videos there.

The new searchit release introduces the possibility to filter private tags by Active Directory permissions. Users can now filter by tags that have been assigned to them based on their Active Directory permissions. This improves personalization and contributes to security, as only relevant and authorized information is displayed.

For users who are specifically looking for images, searchit now offers FAT-Client a responsive image gallery function. This enables an appealing and compact presentation of images in the search results. The image gallery can be displayed via a separate menu item in the blue bar with the special searches. With this selection, the files saved in native image format are displayed in the overview and can be filtered according to the different image formats.

searchit now offers an improved result display through the integration of graphical thumbnails in the result list in the FAT client and web client. This feature allows users to get visual previews of search results at a glance, making it easier to identify relevant content. Instead of generic icons, thumbnails of the images or the automatically generated title pages of the files are now displayed in the list and tile view. On the desktop, these preview images are enlarged on mouse-over, which makes it even easier to identify the correct files.

Another option, which is currently only available in the FAT client (not in the mobile version), is to display the images via the view menu. All files are displayed as images. If it is not an image or a file with an automatically generated PDF preview, only a generic icon for the file is displayed in this view.

The new searchit release also includes support for canonical links in order to recognize duplicate content. This not only improves the quality of indexing, but also prevents redundant search results.

The search functionality of searchit has been extended by an auto-complete function. As you type, various search term suggestions are offered in order of relevance and similar spelling. This not only saves time, especially with longer search terms, but also avoids possible typing errors, which ultimately leads to more relevant search results.

searchit has improved its usability in the current release by increasing support for mobile devices with different resolutions. The responsive design ensures that the software is optimally displayed on every device.

A new filter allows searchit users to search specifically for file extensions such as .exe, .pdf, .doc etc.. All file extensions are available, including exotic ones that do not belong to the standard file extensions. The use of this filter is particularly recommended for this type of file type.

In terms of accessibility, searchit has also received further improvements with the current release. The ReadSpeaker of the text-to-speech tools is now also supported in order to optimize the accessible user experience.

Numerous new functions for downloading YouTube information have been added to the searchit archive plugin.

The searchit system has been optimized to efficiently clean up old documents and free up storage space. For example, thumbnails that are no longer required are automatically deleted once a week if no active data records are found for them.

• Indexing – O365 Connector
  With the new O365 Connector, searchit now supports the indexing of Exchange and SharePoint via Microsoft Office 365.
• Indexing – Quantum Tape Library
  searchit can now check tapes from the Quantum Tape Library. This extends the search functionality of the Archive plugin.
• Multi-instance support for the click function (FAT client)
  For customers with several searchit instances, the software now offers the option of clicking on all instances with a central click service.
• “Did you mean…” functionality in the search function (FAT client, web client)
  If searches have been carried out that have not led to any results, searchit now offers a “Did you mean…” functionality that suggests similar search terms from the index.

The duplicate search makes it possible to search all connected search sources for duplicated documents or files. This allows you to see at a glance how often a file has been duplicated in various sources.

The resulting additional storage effort can be easily minimized by deletions directly through searchit.

A new feature of searchit that is aimed at improving knowledge management is the ability to annotate search results. The annotations can be viewed in real time by all authorized users and can be searched and found with corresponding search queries.

With the release of version 2.6, searchit gets even more functions to ensure seamless accessibility. In this release, both the web interface and the website search have been adapted for other screen readers.

The website integration now makes it possible to use the Enterprise Search Engine searchIT as a search on multisite websites. The search can be integrated individually on a special search page, but also on existing pages in the form of a small search field. Depending on the configuration, the filter options familiar from searchIT are available for the website search. Predefined area filters can be used to specify which data should be taken into account when searching on the respective website.

In order to be able to release certain documents to users without their own user account, we enable anonymous login with searchIT version 2.5. For example, municipalities can make documents such as applications or other data available to their citizens in the form of a citizen service.

Using artificial intelligence, searchIT manages to extract the topics of the data to be searched. In addition to the previously available filter options, search results can now be filtered according to their content. A new view has been integrated to display the topics in the best possible way. Relevant keywords are displayed in the tag cloud, and the frequency of the topic is visualized by the color and font size of the word.

The document preview has been improved so that, in addition to a simple text preview, the first pages of a document are now displayed in the original layout in the form of an automatically generated PDF. In the new preview, you can now switch between text, PDF and metadata previews.

More about the preview…

We have introduced “tag handling” in order to be able to tag documents privately or publicly for all employees. By assigning tags, which can also contain a hierarchy, we make it possible to give certain documents several parameters in order to search and filter for them later.

A tag can be added to a file via the icon.

If a document has already been tagged, this tag is located in the selected color under the file name and the path.

All existing private and public tags can be managed by clicking on the tag icon in the module bar. All metadata of the tag is also visible here.

The graphical search filters can be used to filter specifically according to the assigned tags. Double-click to filter deeper in the tag hierarchy.

Revised time dimension filters make it possible to limit results to a specific time period even more quickly.

Using the quick selection, a period ending on the current day can be selected with just one click.

With the relative selection, a search period can be selected starting from the current day. For example, the period from 20 days ago to 5 days ago can be searched.

With the absolute selection, the date for the start and end point of the search can be specified.

The selection options can be used to specify which time is to be taken into account for the time dimension.

The search algorithm is constantly being improved.

In order to be able to search very long documents, such as books, with many individual pages more precisely, we have introduced the “document section search”. This puts an end to endless scrolling, even if the instance you are looking for is in the last chapter of a book, for example. Long documents are divided into individual blocks (document areas, e.g. 10 pages each).

The document area is marked with the icon . Documents that have been divided into document areas are called “main documents” and are identified by the icon .

Clicking on the Main documents icon starts a “Look-Up Search” and displays all document areas of this main document.

The option filters can be used to filter either document areas or main documents.

To perform a search in specific fields (e.g. in the file name), a list of field names can be loaded using the TAB key in the search field. Then simply select any field with the cursor keys or the mouse pointer. Here are a few examples: There are parent fields that are in the namespace “all.*”, such as all.filename or all.author. There are also type-dependent fields such as email.cc, kontakt.unternehmen or dok.beschreibung
Also see: Documentation: Interaktive Suchzeile

The search algorithm is constantly being improved. Multiselect, umlauts, etc. are among the optimizations in version 2.3.