SEFT: a search engine for text

Abstract

We present a software tool called seft which balances the convenience of search tools such as grep with the functionality of full‐text index‐based information retrieval. Based on a novel retrieval heuristic which uses term locality as a guide to relevance, seft combines the freedom of natural language queries with the benefits of a ranked answer list and easy inspection of retrieval results. While not as fast as grep‐style tools, seft provides a valuable facility for impromptu personal information retrieval tasks. Copyright © 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.