Recoll is a full text search application, which means that it finds your data by content rather than by external attributes (like the file name). You specify words (terms) which should or should not appear in the text you are looking for, and receive in return a list of matching documents, ordered so that the most relevant documents will appear first.
You do not need to remember in what file or email message you stored a given piece of information. You just ask for related terms, and the tool will return a list of documents where these terms are prominent, in a similar way to Internet search engines.
Full text search applications try to determine which documents are most relevant to the search terms you provide. Computer algorithms for determining relevance can be very complex, and in general are inferior to the power of the human mind to rapidly determine relevance. The quality of relevance guessing is probably the most important aspect when evaluating a search application. Recoll relies on the Xapian probabilistic information retrieval library to determine relevance.
In many cases, you are looking for all the forms of a
word, including plurals, different tenses for a verb, or terms
derived from the same root or stem
(example: floor, floors, floored,
flooring...). Queries are usually automatically
expanded to all such related terms (words that reduce to the
same stem). This can be prevented for searching for a specific
form.
Stemming, by itself, does not accommodate for misspellings or
phonetic searches. A full text search application may also support
this form of approximation. For example, a search for
aliterattion returning no result might
propose alliteration, alteration, alterations, or
altercation as possible replacement terms. Recoll bases
its suggestions on the actual index contents, so that suggestions may
be made for words which would not appear in a standard dictionary.
