Mutual Fund Managers Representing over $3 Trillion Worth of Mutual Fund Assets Use dtSearch Text Retrieval Engine on MS IIS 4.0 To Do Mutual Fund Research

Begun in 1986, Strategic Insight supports the research efforts of over 125 mutual fund companies who collectively oversee 85% of mutual fund industry assets (approximately $5.5 trillion). Strategic Insight's clients also include service, distribution, and finance organizations, as well as non-U.S.-based advisors. Strategic Insight provides a range of services to address the information and research needs of its clients in their strategy, marketing, distribution, pricing, planning, and product development processes.

Strategic Insight's latest offering is Fund Filing(tm), a Web-based mutual fund electronic document retrieval system. Designed to address the need for mutual fund document research in a time-saving way, Fund Filing offers multiple options for full-text and other searches across the entire library of mutual fund and variable annuity prospectuses, annual reports, proxies, and other SEC-filed documents.

Under the Hood

"We set out to offer full-text searching of all SEC documents filed by all mutual fund companies," says Hanna Bayoud, the manager of Fund Filing. The current total represents about 20 gigabytes of material. To handle the material on the host site, Mr. Bayoud chose to use Microsoft NT Server with Internet Information Service 4.0 as the platform.

The criteria that Mr. Bayoud needed in a full-text search engine were as follows:

• full compatibility with IIS 4.0
• fast full-text searching of 20 gigabytes or more of text
• a multitude of search options for precision searching
• display of retrieved documents with the relevant search terms highlighted
• easy maintenance in connection with an ever-changing and expanding database

The full-text search engine matching these requirements was dtSearch Text Retrieval Engine. The chief developer, Max Rottersman, explains: "dtSearch co-exists with IIS 4.0 very well and has an easy to follow object-model. It delivers state-of-the-art power and stability." dtSearch's Text Retrieval Engine can be called from any ASP page to index or perform searching. "dtSearch Text Retrieval Engine makes searching of Fund Filings' database quick, easy and thoroughly comprehensive," adds Mr. Rottersman.

For searching, "dtSearch has every full-text feature I can imagine," says Mr. Rottersman. Text search options in dtSearch products number over two dozen, and include highly sophisticated capabilities such as fuzzy searching adjustable from 1 to 10, multiple level concept searching, natural language with precision relevancy-ranking, and much more.

dtSearch's searching algorithms allow it to handle many levels of complexity. A single search request can contain multiple boolean, proximity, numeric range, phonic, fuzzy, synonym, etc., elements. "Many clients probably only use 10% of dtSearch's search features," says Mr. Rottersman.

After a search, dtSearch Web displays retrieved Web pages with the hits highlighted inside popular browsers. This makes it easy for users to go straight to the relevant part of a document containing a search term. Many of these documents are quite long, and users might otherwise have to comb through a document all day to find a search term.

From a development perspective, dtSearch Text Retrieval Engine makes maintainance of a continually updating searchable database easy. "We created a separate Visual Basic application to automatically add additional filings to the document database," says Mr. Rottersman. "dtSearch can quickly determine which documents are not in the index and add, or delete, them."

To further make it easy to continually update the searchable mutual funds database, the documents themselves can remain in the original format that the SEC provides. This is possible because the dtSearch Text Retrieval Engine provides on-the-fly conversion of documents to HTML from other popular file formats. So Fund Filing can leave all files right in their original text format.

"dtSearch offer many solutions including stand-alone versions and self-contained Web toolkits. They all work with the same indexes making it easy to standardize," says Mr. Rottersman. Finally, "dtSeach tech support is great though one can usually figure out anything from examining its log files, something we always forget to do!"