What to do about DocFetcher?

The freeware desktop file-indexed and keyword searcher DocFetcher has been sporked by the Java runtime update, specifically failing to launch due to an error with the JIntellitype64.dll file. The code archive for this file suggests similar problems for others in the past. And the comments at SourceForge suggest other are finding the latest Java (mid July 2020) repeatedly crashes DocFetcher. Apparently it’s also causing problems for several other bits of software.

The fallback is not the official portable version of DocFetcher, sadly, which has the same problem. Nor is falling back to an earlier version of DocFetcher. Nor is the solution to download and install the latest 64-bit Java for Windows again. It appears that the old 32-bit software just doesn’t play nicely with the latest mid-July Java. This is confirmed by a comment buried on SourceForge from the developer…

“A proper bugfix for DocFetcher won’t be available until 2021, so for now downgrading to Java 8u251 is the only workaround”.

But by that time the software will be “DocFetcher Pro” and $50 paid for a perpetual licence. Ah well. Still, that’s good value compared to dtSearch, and is not a subscription like Copernic Desktop. But… $50. So, an alternative freeware option will soon be needed. I took a look…

1) There is Recoll on Windows, which looks like it’s halfway there, but it costs 5 Euros. That’s not viable if you were wanting to distribute a bit of full-text search freeware with the archive of a large defunct technical forum. Still, by 2021 it might have developed further. (Update: the maker has commented, noting it’s GPL and copies may be freely redistributed).

2) The developer of the freeware AnyTXT Searcher has been knocking the rough edges off it and expanding file types, over the last year. But, while it bills itself a “Google Desktop Search Alternative” is still appears not to have any sort of acceptable in-file preview on its search results. The other problem is that its start-up time is extremely slow. Several minutes, rather than seconds. You expect that of behemoths like Photoshop, but not of a little Windows utility. Plus it appears to be “all or nothing”, and there’s no ability to index just a few folders. Uninstalled.

3) Another possible choice is Exselo, said to be very powerful and yet also free desktop search. But… like DocFetcher it’s Java based. Plus, it’s Registerware and “Invites are sent to friends” (register via Facebook?). It’s a system-hog, and it stops working after 14 days if you don’t accept automatic updates. The developers were obviously hoping to sell it on, and lacking a buyer are now pitching it as a trendy “secure chat environment”? Blugh.

4) The old standby Copernic Desktop has become slightly better. The free version still has no .PDF or Word support, but the 10,000 file limit has now been raised to 25,000. It also has a new $15 “knowledge worker” edition, but that just turns out to be a “per-year subscription”. It’s now Registerware, even to just download the Trial. Thus it’s not feasible as freeware to distribute along with a large forum archive.

5) The old 2010 Multifind would be a good choice, if only it built an initial index and was thus fast. For some, the lack of a requirement to build an index may be a feature not a drawback. Despite its slowness due to a lack of an index, it can find and display text inside files. And it’s genuine old-school Windows freeware and has a tiny footprint. If you wanted to make something to fill the freeware gap that’s looming with the loss of DocFetcher, you might do worse than buy the rights to this and start developing it again.

So it’s back to DocFetcher. One can’t go back beyond DocFetcher 1.1.20, as that was when it started indexing HTML with no body element (e.g. RSS-feed forum-threads archived in XML and re-named .HTML), and anyway that doesn’t fix the problem. So it looks like the only real solution to get DocFetcher working is the downgrade to Java SE Runtime Environment 8u251 (jre-8u251-windows-x64.exe), which is a security risk unlikely to be welcomed by those who just want a free search tool for use with their forum archives. Perhaps what’s needed is to make a truly portable DocFetcher, which never has to call on the Windows system’s Java runtime?

Towards a meta-pedia browser add-on

An interesting idea: a meta-pedia browser add-on, to consult all public encyclopedias at the same time. Presenting the results as an elegant full-screen dashboard with a strip of side-links to Google Books, Archive.org, Scholar, JURN etc. Ideally with configurable sources…

* Wikipedia
* Current Britannica
* 1911 Britannica
* Specialist public encyclopedias is they exist for the topic, e.g. Philosophy, Catholic, Science-fiction etc.

I’m assuming this would need to be a browser add-on, as a cloud service that did this would face lawsuits and frame-busting scripts. The closest I can find is 2019’s free ResearchKit which shows Wikipedia and the current Britannica side-by-side, above bot-driven auto-summaries of their text. It’s not exactly elegant to look at it, but it works.

Obviously some fuzzy-lookup might be needed to align search topics, though the individual encyclopedias strive to do that on their pages via navigation strips and links.

But rather than jumping straight to a presumed page, perhaps each encyclopedia panel might first show sub-panels with a half-dozen ‘possible’ hits, colour-shaded by order of likely relevance to the search. If such a browser addon was in widespread use, the data gathered from such mass human-driven topic-selection/alignment might be rather useful, over time being judiciously used to augment existing ‘knowledge navigation trees’ that are able to cope at a meta-level with shifting topic titles (e.g. Aetheopia > Abyssinia > Horn of Africa > Eastern Africa > Ethiopia).

Another way to do it might be for the addon to ‘read’ such existing navigation on the encyclopedia pages, make its own deft distillation of such, and then use that to ‘prime’ with keywords the sidebar links to Google Books, Archive.org, Scholar, JURN etc.

New from Google Research

Google Research has launched COVID-19 Research Explorer. This has “a semantic search interface” that enables better search and discovery across “more than 50,000 journal articles and preprints”.

A new group test of search

Which Academic Search Systems are Suitable for Systematic Reviews or Meta-Analyses? Evaluating Retrieval Qualities of Google Scholar, PubMed and 26 other Resources, October 2019.

“Our tests revealed that the help files of numerous search systems promise a Boolean search functionality that our tests could not verify. These findings were especially alarming because users of such systems rely on functionalities that they assume work properly, but that may not be the case.” … “our results contradict systematic review guidance that assumes that “all the search engines in some way [would] permit the use of Boolean syntax operators to expand or restrict the search””.

Regarding… “full Boolean search strategies” the authors also noted that “Google Scholar [does] not offer such functionality”. The word “full” here is the critical word, and indicates that NOT is still a missing operator for Google Scholar.

For open access, this new test concludes that those outside of biomedical research… “are limited to the multidisciplinary system BASE” for discovering open access material, but that unspecified… “other open, or partially open search systems that fail to meet the criteria for query-based search might still be useful for supplementary search methods.”

Review of Cabell’s Predatory Journal Blacklist

A new review of a paywalled up-to-date blacklist of predatory journals, “Cabell’s Predatory Journal Blacklist: An Updated Review”, at the Scholarly Kitchen.

SciRide Finder

SciRide Finder is a newly launched search tool that searches Medline/PubMed, but it limits the search to just those “statements, numbers and protocols” which cite other publications. A fine idea, but the core concept may initially be a little difficult for humanities scholars to fathom. You can see what they’re talking about, in this visual example…

SciRide Finder appears to have crashed under the initial surge of traffic, but is “under maintenance” and should be up again soon.

Mamont

I’m pleased to find another good FTP search engine for filename searches, Mamont. The best of the bunch on Biskbard’s survey.

Caught in the Web

“Building a mission critical research ecosystem for Russia” (Feb 2019). The glossy report appears to be at attempt to sell Web of Science to Russia, and states…

The Web of Science platform is the first and only comprehensive, publisher-neutral discovery resource for trusted, peer-reviewed Open Access content.

More on OA in Web of Science and Scopus

A new February 2019 paper, from the German Centre for Higher Education Research and Science Studies, testing existing methods for auto-detection of OA papers in Web of Science (WOS) and Scopus. The conclusions are about what you might expect — that it’s easier said than done, even with such well-behaved services, and even then it’s partial.

But as part of the study a research assistant valiantly undertook further manual checking by hand. They found that OA full-text links there were broken at a rate of 17%…

“a further manual check found about 17% of OA publications are not accessible … 17.57% in WOS and 16.74% in Scopus.”

OOIR

The new OOIR List. Currently with 849 journals in its List, these being from Web of Science’s SSCI journals in social studies. 119 of the titles on the OOIR List are flagged as Open Access, though a good number of these are greyed-out and not tracked (because they don’t bother to also submit to CrossRef).

Evidently Web of Science only covers 119 such OA titles, which means its OA coverage in this area has hardly budged since 2015 when Web of Science was only showing 116 titles in OA in social studies.

Within that very limited range, what OOIR is trying to do with its titles seems interesting, by providing an aggregated ‘latest’ / ‘trending’ / ‘active journals’ dashboard. It’s neatly presented, and there are also per-journal metrics over on the Statistics tab.

Apparently the service is focussed on recent papers, and “OOIR does not link to papers published before Nov 2018”. A previous RSS-feed based version, for politics and diplomacy, was titled Observatory of International Relations (OIR). But this has now been shut in favour of OOIR.

I guess the question now is, would it be possible to build something bigger and similar and slightly shinier, that could provide a public tracking-dashboard for all such material of use to those interested in timely new research on politics, diplomacy and related matters? Zak Kallenborn has some ideas on that in his recent article “Academic Paywalls Harm National Security”.