Robert Pirsig spent a good deal of time on his motorcycle in the 1970s contemplating the metaphysics of quality. In my own way, I’ve been on a similar quixotic mission for at least the past eight years — in search of “quality” in the e-discovery search space. This particular quest for the Holy Grail has involved seeking out the perfect search where one finds “just” highly relevant documents in response to a FRCP 34 document request,  or, as a matter of early case assessment, “just” the hot documents one needs to win the case. I’ve searched the world over for answers, and along the way decided that I had been asking the wrong question.
At one time, I thought I knew what the problem was, and what the information retrieval “task” should be to overcome the problem. The problem, I thought, was simply the naïve use of keywords. Or at least, the way lawyers naively think about keywords when going about the task of searching for electronic evidence. I think many lawyers still practice with the assumption that using simple keywords, without more, to find responsive ESI is sufficient to get them through the day in dealing with their e-discovery obligations. While this remains a problem, it is not in my view the problem. And the task is not simply to try to “beat Boolean” with other search methods.

e-Discovery Team - In Search of Quality: Is It Time for E-Discovery Search Process Quality Standards?

”The indexing service that powers Windows search can now perform OCR of TIFF images. Though not enabled by default (due to resource usage constraints), installing it gives full-text searching of TIFFs. Scanned documents and faxes are the main target for this capability.”

See the Microsoft TechNet page for installation info.

ARS Technica – Hasta la Vista, baby: Ars reviews Windows 7 (p.14 of 15)