?? Why Search Alone Can’t Save You in Construction (And What to Do About It)
We all know that a typical construction project comes with an insane amount of information, most of it being text. Let's say you’re working on a 30-unit apartment complex. There's a lot of reading involved—equivalent to cranking through many large novels. And that's just the text! Now add in images, details, and callouts, and you’ve got a full-blown scavenger hunt on your hands.
We all know you obviously read every single word (of course!) But on that one rare occasion when you can’t find a callout on a sheet, you’re going to rely on search tools.
So you type it in, hit search, and—drumroll—no results. Weird. You try a few different keywords. Nada. Eventually, you shrug it off, assuming it must’ve been from another job. Fast forward a few months, and surprise! You missed a crucial detail. The result? Thousands of dollars in delays, and let’s not even mention the sleepless nights that follow.
Moral of the story: WE CANNOT RELY ON SEARCH ALONE.
Turns out, there are two types of PDFs, and from the outside, you can't tell them apart. A vector PDF is like having the full blueprint, while a raster PDF is conniving and tricky–it looks like it has everything but, in reality, the computer only sees dots. Not words, not images—just a bunch of specks.
When we first built Constructable, we thought we could ignore raster - most PDFs seemed to be vector anyway, right? Then one of our customers missed a crucial callout on a bid. Oops.
So we dug in, did our homework, and realized something pretty alarming. A single PDF sheet can have both vector and raster elements. So even if you think everything on a page is searchable, a portion of it might be raster—leaving part of the sheet totally invisible to search. Our analysis showed that, on average, 25% of drawing pages have raster components, meaning search only works three-quarters of the time. So when you’re searching for "Trash Enclosure," you’re only getting about 75% of the results. This does not build confidence. Yikes.
That’s when we said, enough is enough. Enter OCR—Optical Character Recognition. This nifty tech is like a pair of eyes that scans those pesky dots and turns them into actual, searchable text.
So, the real question is: Is your software OCRing every drawing sheet, every PDF, and every submittal attachment? If not, you might be missing out on critical details.
At Constructable, we’re here to make sure you never miss a thing. That sneaky Raster?PDF doesn’t stand a chance.
And to close out this post, I will quote one of our customers “Your search is pretty Bitchin!”
Note: (not an AI generated image) Also, this image would become searchable if it appeared in a drawing in our product! Check us out Constructable ??♀? ??♀? ??♂?
#contech #construction
