To efficiently search through paragraphs of text or files of varying types, you need full-text search capabilities. Adobe ColdFusion includes the Verity search engine, which provides full-text indexing and searching.

The Verity engine performs searches against collections, not against the actual documents. A collection is a special database created by Verity that contains metadata that describes the documents that you have indexed. The indexing process examines documents of various types in a collection and creates a metadata description--the index--which is specialized for rapid search and retrieval operations.

The ColdFusion implementation of Verity supports collections of the following basic data types:

• Text files such as HTML pages and CFML pages
• Binary documents (see Supported file types)
• Record sets returned from a query and CF query object, including: cfquery, cfldap, and cfpop queries

You can build collections from individual documents or from an entire directory tree. Collections can be stored anywhere, so you have a great deal of flexibility in accessing indexed data.

In your ColdFusion application, you can search multiple collections, each of which can focus on a specific group of documents or queries, according to subject, document type, location, or any other logical grouping. Because you can perform searches against multiple collections, you have substantial flexibility in designing your search interface.