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     Indexing is an investment — it costs a little time and disk space, but you get in exchange the ability to browse and correlate information throughout your database in real time.  Specifically, a Free Text index consists of two files:  one file of “keys” (which are the distinct words and their occurrence counts in your database), and the other file of “pointers” (which indicate where to find every instance of every word).  The index files have the same name as your original database file but with “.k” or “.p” appended.  They should be kept in the same folder as your main database file, so that Free Text can find and use them.
 
     Free Text index-building is *fast*!  On a standard Macintosh Plus with a slow hard disk drive, I typically have found that indexing proceeds at better than 3 megabytes/hour.  On a Mac II, I've measured speeds of 12-17 MB/h.  In one experiment, on a Sun Workstation (using qndxr.c, a compatible indexing program), I got over 50 MB/h.  Of course, your mileage may vary....