Best way to search thousands of PDF documents?

[nextgengamer.biz]

Hello,

I'm looking for the most efficient way (read: FAST) to search thousands of PDF documents at once. The files themselves are very small as they are captures of a single page in a newspaper. The content will be on a local computer with a 3-4 level folder index (Year > Month > Day > pdf file).

I have a couple of ideas in mind and wanted to get some feedback:

1. Use Adobe Reader 8's built in PDF file search tool.
2. Use a desktop search tool such as Google or other variant
3. Combine the PDFs (is this possible?) and use a search tool

I'm most interested in #3 due to the fact that the PDFs are so small. I figure the search would be much more efficient searching 1 PDF with 20 pages versus 20 1-page PDFs.

Any help would be appreciated!

Thanks,

Adam

 

[pigster]

I would use approach #2.

We use Windows Desktop Search on our workstations; once the index is written it will run any search in just a couple of seconds. Other desktop search tools will give you similar results.

 

[nextgengamer.biz]

I would use approach #2.

We use Windows Desktop Search on our workstations; once the index is written it will run any search in just a couple of seconds. Other desktop search tools will give you similar results.

Thanks for the reply. When you mention it searches the documents in a number of seconds, are you searching through the file names and the documents themselves or just the file names?

 

[pigster]

Searching the documents themselves, not the filenames.

BTW, if you go the Windows Desktop Search route, use the 2.6.6 version, and make sure Acrobat Reader 8 is installed on each workstation