Our document repository is now over 250 documents and it is becoming hard to remember where I have read certain things and which different articles have information relevant to what it is I am interested in. In the past when we hosted our own site it had a built in search function that was linked to an index of all our documentation in the repository. However, since moving to a hosted service for the last 2 iterations of our site this function had to be sacrificed. I have tried to encourage google to index our repository, however it is slow and I find the results to date to be less than satisfactory.

Enter Regain! It is a personal search engine and you control what gets indexed; documents of various formats and webpages that you can then search just like you would using the more familiar search engines. I have used both the server version and the personal version and must say that I think they are great! No more looking through a long list of documents trying to recall which one(s) has the information I’m looking for. Just fire up regain’s web-interface and punch in my search criteria and Voila! instant access to all the relevant information with links back to the original documents.

I have installed the windows personal version on our PC and pointed it at our document repository which it happily indexed very quickly so now all those documents are even more useful. Regain updates its index regularly so any new content gets added to the index for searching and I can mix in other good resources to be indexed as well. One can build their very own purpose built tightly focussed search engine on your own computer. Nerdy I know but how great is that. I highly recommend it to anyone that has a significant amount of material that it would be useful to search through or if you want to build your own custom, subject specific search engine- all for free no less.

PS: I did try other products as well and will include some links below.

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