By Tisha Davis, Derek Ametam and Joe Wanzala 

This is the sixth installment in our series on dtSearch. In this installment, we’ll continue to explore how to actually search your discovery data and make the most of dtSearch’s powerful search capabilities. You can find the previous installments here: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4 and Part 5

In this installment, we will explore how to leverage dtSearch’s advanced Search features to further refine and expand your searches. These powerful options—such as fuzzy searching, synonym searching, stemming, phonic searching, and more—allow you to handle common real-world challenges like misspellings, OCR errors, varied terminology, and conceptual relationships.

By enabling and combining these features you can dramatically increase recall without sacrificing precision and adapt searches to noisy or inconsistent document sets.

The Search Features panel in dtSearch lets users refine or broaden their searches through additional options that enhance precision and recall.

i. Stemming

Includes grammatical variations of a word.
Example: Searching for “assault”.

Without stemming: 13 files, 26 hits.

With stemming: Includes “assaulted,” “assaulting,” and “assaults” (14 files, 31 hits)

This feature is useful when the same concept appears in multiple verb forms.

ii. Phonic Searching

Finds words that sound alike, even if they are spelled differently.
Example: Searching for “grey” with Phonic Search enabled also retrieves “gray.”

Phonic searching helps capture variations that may occur due to spelling preferences, transcription errors, or dialectal differences.

iii. Fuzzy Searching

Compensates for common misspellings or OCR errors in scanned or poorly digitized text.
Example: Searching for “police” with Fuzzy Level 4 may also return “pouce.”

Adjusting the fuzzy level controls how tolerant the search is to character mismatches.

iv. Synonym and Related Word Searching

Expands searches to include conceptually related terms based on dtSearch’s built-in or user-defined thesaurus.
Example: Searching for “assault” may also return “crime,” “fight,” or “violation.”

This feature is particularly useful for legal, investigative, or domain-specific analysis where different terms may refer to the same underlying concept or event.

v. Combining Operators and Search Features

For the most effective results, combine Boolean operators and search features strategically:

Layer searches to move from broad to narrow. For example, start with Brownson OR Romanowski to identify all related documents, then refine with Brownson w/5 Romanowski to focus on closer associations.

Use phrases and proximity together to capture meaningful context—e.g., (“Romanowski w/5 Jones”) AND “assault” locates documents where both names appear near each other in connection with the incident.

Apply stemming and fuzzy searching to ensure coverage of grammatical and spelling variations.

Leverage synonyms and related terms to capture conceptual variations (e.g., “attack,” “strike,” “assault”, “fight”).^[1]

In the next installment of this series, we will examine Search within a Search (also referred to as iterative searching or nested searching)—one of dtSearch’s most powerful techniques for progressively refining results and drilling down into large set of discovery with precision.

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[1] In a future installment of this series, we will explore how the User Thesaurus allows you to expand and refine dtSearch’s built-in synonym framework to better reflect domain-specific language and concepts.