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Welcome to the eSearch-project wiki!

Introduction

The eSearch project was started in 2022, the aim was to produce an alternative product to dtSearch Desktop for the European market with a UI that could be easily translated. Because of licensing issues we chose the Lucene c# .NET search engine which is open-source and well established. We also wanted to have a more modern UI that would use dark mode as default, we chose the Avalonia framework with a MVVM architecture running on the latest version of .NET core.

For stemming we offer either the traditional Porter English or the same multilingual stemming rules that we developed for dtSearch. For synonyms we use the rules that we previously developed for the User Thesaurus Plus add-on for dtSearch, and lastly for what is called Phonic search in dtSearch we use the standard Soundex rules.

Finally we also decided to offer a plugin architecture, so that indexing could be extended to other data sources such as Amazon S3, Dropbox, SharePoint, etc.

During the development period it became obvious that large language models were developing rapidly and had become of commercial value, we therefor decided to add an 'AI mode' in late 2023 and offered connections to the Perplexity API, the Open AI API and a 'Custom' connection for any other online or offline OpenAI compatible API. Our aim is to extend the AI capabilities as this field develops and matures.

Apart from the initial desktop eSearch Pro application, we developed a portable version for use on USB drives for publishing of searchable data or for eDiscovery purposes, searching of machines without having to install software.

For use within the enterprise, eSearch includes the ability for IT administrators to install with command line arguments that restrict users to being able to search indexes or query online or offline LLMs, but without ability to create new indexes or LLM connections, or change any settings of the indexes or connections.

Licensing is Currently proprietary. The eSearch Pro version will be free for personal, non-commercial use while a TARILIO branded version will be for commercial use. At some stage we may make the eSearch Pro version open-source. The plugin API will be published so that others can develop plugins to connect to external data-sources, these may be offered for sale as 'community plugins' much the same way that thr Obsidian application also has 'core' and 'community' plugins.

If you would like to download beta versions, see the release notes, or sign up as a beta tester, go to: https://searchcloudone.com/universal-desktop-search/

4 June 2025.