Nuix surveyed over 200 digital forensic investigators around the world to discover how they used keyword searches and other analytical investigation techniques. How do your experiences match up with others in the field? Download this report to find out.Nuix recently surveyed over 200 industry professionals globally to better understand the tools and methods being used to conduct investigations around the world. Our Beyond Keywords Survey Report captures the key findings from the research.
Keyword searches play an important role in digital forensic investigations to this day. Despite their prevalence, however, they are an imperfect method of identifying relevant evidence from large (and growing) data sets. Keyword searches by their nature are likely to turn up huge amounts of responsive documents or data, forcing investigators to manually sort through the results in a time-consuming and inefficient manner. When case backlogs are an ever-present challenge – is there a better way of approaching evidence? Could visual analytics help get to the answer faster?
While investigators have many other options for working through case evidence, there’s a resistance to abandoning keywords altogether. Why is that? The results of this survey point to the common tendency to keep doing things “the way we’ve always done them.” Whether that is because of institutional resistance or stubbornness on the part of investigative teams, the reality is that keyword searches will continue to become less suited on their own to answering the very real need for timely, efficient analysis of case data.
