Better pdf search function
This is a short note documenting the improvements brought today to the pdf search function.
“Eat your own dog food”
This is a saying often used in entrepreneurship and software development, conveying the idea that you will ship better products and services if you are actually using them for your own consumption. Because you will be as critical, impatient and demanding as any classic user would be: that makes for a great source of feedback, free and instantaneous!
It just happened again. I develop nocodefunctions.com, a free platform for click-and-point data analytics. One such functions is simply: searching terms in pdfs, which I had developed in response to the need of a journalist.
For an academic project, I now need this pdf search for myself. And I realize how limited the function currently is. It should be more performant than just a keyword search. I’d like to add conditions (AND, OR…) and exclusions (NOT). Also, choose the search to be case sensitive or not.
So… I just implemented these changes! They will serve my needs, and hopefully the needs of many others. ❤️
You can test it there: free pdf search online function
About me
I am a professor at emlyon business school where I conduct research in Natural Language Processing and network analysis applied to social sciences and the humanities. I teach about the impact of digital technologies on business and society. I also build nocode functions 🔎, a click and point web app to explore texts and networks. It is fully open source. Try it and give some feedback, I would appreciate it!
- my email: analysis@exploreyourdata.com 📧
- or on Twitter: @seinecle 📱
- you can also read the other articles of this blog 👓, where I write about the process of developing the app.