Indexing is an investment ΓÇö 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 ΓÇ£keysΓÇ¥ (which are the distinct words and their occurrence counts in your database), and the other file of ΓÇ£pointersΓÇ¥ (which indicate where to find every instance of every word). The index files have the same name as your original database file but with ΓÇ£.kΓÇ¥ or ΓÇ£.pΓÇ¥ 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....
