When it comes to searching for electronic data contained inside a computer for use in litigation, the meaning of "search" takes on a broader and detailed scope. Searching for data on a computer is obviously not the same as searching for a document within a file cabinet.
With the file cabinet search, you are dealing with printed paper, you can see, touch, smell and feel. However searching for data that resides inside a computer amounts to searching for documents you cannot feel, smell or touch.
Interestingly, when you see your document on the computer screen as text or numbers or a combination of both. What is representing those text and numbers on your screen are actually a combination of 1 and zeros known as binaries.
In summary, the computer does not store data in English, French, German or Spanish. The computer stores data as different combinations of 1's and 0's ( Binaries). However the computer has an automated way of converting what you type on your keyboard to what you can understand on the screen. How does it do this? Patience my friend. This will be the topic of another article.
But for now, let me introduce you to some methods for searching for computer data that is not printed on paper but rather resides in the computer Hard disk as 1's and 0's.
Computer users, employ different names to save their files. Some of these names, will suggest what the file contains but a lot of file names will not suggest the file content. For example I may save a file with the name "orange" on my computer. If you conduct a search on my computer for the word "fruit", the document saved as "Orange" on my computer will not be revealed.
The above position represents what happens with a general search on the computer. However, there are methods and specialised computer search applications that can do a better job. For example a search for "fruit" will reveal the a file saved as "orange".
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