AcademicEDGAR+ is the creator of the SEC Edgar database research application directEDGAR. AppsPlus offers software development and consultancy with a specialty in data-intensive programming. dtSearch is a leading provider of enterprise and developer text retrieval software and document filters. Together, these companies announce the integration of the dtSearch Engine into the latest version of the directEDGAR Search, Extraction & Normalization Engine.
For almost a decade, industry analysts and academic researchers have relied on directEDGAR to identify, extract and normalize content from the millions upon millions of corporate filings made through the SEC’s EDGAR system. As the number of EDGAR filings grows ever larger, directEDGAR needed to upgrade its embedded search engine.
“Advanced search is critical when researchers need to carefully select relevant documents from a population of documents that well exceeds 40 million,” says Dr. Kealey, associate professor of accounting at the University of Nebraska at Omaha and CEO of AcademicEDGAR+. “Our team did a deep dive into all of the search technologies in the market and kept coming back to the incredible and unique feature set offered by the dtSearch Engine.”
“We have over two terabytes of SEC filings and there was no other vendor whose offering allowed immediate access to any document in the results set no matter how many documents are returned.” Dr. Kealey also notes that search granularity is critically important, and dtSearch’s unique operators extend far beyond the standard Boolean operators. “With the full set of dtSearch operators, along with our unique document meta tags that are indexed with the dtSearch Engine, our clients are going to be able to take a much more nuanced approach to defining their search set.”
To complete the implementation, AcademicEDGAR+ chose AppsPlus. AppsPlus specializes in data-rich development projects, and has a 15-year track record of dtSearch Engine custom development projects for clients ranging from non-profits to multibillion dollar IT and telecom companies as well as government organizations like the Department of Defense.
AppsPlus worked with AcademicEDGAR+ to create a next generation version of directEDGAR. “Taking advantage of the dtSearch Engine’s .NETs threading capabilities and background services, we were able to come up with a responsive search application greatly increasing performance over prior versions of the directEDGAR toolset,” says F. Scott Barker of AppsPlus.
But search is just one step in the directEDGAR product. After search, the product also offers extraction of key content, followed by normalization. “Partnering with dtSearch and AppsPlus allows us to focus on our real competency which is adding extraction and normalization features that make it easy for researchers to not only find the relevant documents but convert the content in the documents into data for their research,” adds Dr. Kealey.
dtSearch products can instantly search terabytes of text, including 25+ full-text and metadata hit-highlighted search features. dtSearch’s proprietary document filters support a wide range of document types, emails and attachments, databases and other online data. The dtSearch Engine has APIs for .NET, C++ and Java, with SDKs for Windows, Linux, Android and Mac OS/X in beta. The dtSearch Engine can also run on Azure with searching via Microsoft’s RemoteApp, giving search the “look and feel” of a native application under Windows, Android, iOS or OS/X.
