PDF searches and how to best index/catalog files.

Question

Dear members:
Please forgive me if my questions are rather basic but I haven't been able to find the exact answers I am looking for in order to address my project needs.
I have a folder where I keep all of my PDF files. These are all articles from medical journals that I keep organized using a browser application specific for these types of articles. The application allows me to search these articles but it only looks for specific keywords (title, author name, date, journal name and keyword just to name a few). However, it doesn't look at the content of the PDF file to find words that are contained in the body of the article itself.
I would like to be able to use Acrobat to search these articles and try to find words I am looking for in the entire article instead of being restricted only to keywords. These are the questions I have:
1. What is the best way to index these PDF files so that they can become searchable ?
2. Is there a way to find out if they have already been indexed by the publishing company so that I avoid wasting time by doing it again ?
3. My library now contains approximately 15,000 articles and I expect it to grow to at least 30,000. How can I handle these searches so that performance doesn't become an issue ? Is there a way to ensure that Acrobat can search these number of files without taking a long time ?
4. I understand from the help files that Acrobat can search an entire folder so I don't have to run my search one article or file at a time. Is this correct ? What is the best way to run my search so that Acrobat looks at all files in one folder ? In this folder I have subfolders (subdirectories) ? Will Acrobat look at all files when searching including those in subdirectories within the specified directory ?
Thank you in advance for your help and replies.
Best regards,
Joseph Chamberlain

Answer 1

Hi Joseph,
1. Acrobat Professional ships with the ability to create full text indexes of folders called Catalog. The indexes generated by Catalog can be used by Acrobat or Reader program to quickly search large collection of documents. Here are couple of documents that will give you the idea:
http://blogs.adobe.com/acrolaw/2007/06/full_text_search_of_pdf_using_ad.html
http://www.adobe.com/designcenter/acrobat/articles/acr7at_pdfindex.html
2. I don't think so
3. When you use Catalog on an already existing index, you will get an option to either "Build" or "Rebuild". The former would scan the documents and process only the new, deleted or changed documents. Rebuild would build the index from scratch - slower but gives faster searches. You can also schedule building indexes at regular interval using a scheduler.
4. Yes.
Use advanced search and select the folder you wish to search on.
This would however be slower than searching a Catalog generated index.