Search With Quotation Marks

[uddybay]

I would like to know if Zoom can be set up to automatically enclose all searches in quotation marks.

Thanks
Buddy

[David]

There is an option to disable exact phrase searching, but there is no option to force it on. You need to type the quotes if you want exact phrase.

Any other behaviour would be confusing as everyone expects this behaviour now, as a result of Google and other engines.

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David

[Sparky]

Just wondering if this has been looked at again.......

If I do a search for North Sydney on google withoutn using quotes, the results all contain the phrase "North Sydney"

If I do the same search on my site, I recieved a whole lot of results with Sydney. Pages that contain the phrase "North Sydney" are listed but are lower in the search

[Ray]

I'm not sure if Google is really behaving as you suggest. Here's an example that shows otherwise:

Try doing a search on Google for "zoom search" (with quotes) and then doing a search for it without quotes. You will see that the results are different, most significantly, result #3 (the one after our website) does not actually contain the exact phrase.

While your results certainly imply that improvements can be made to Zoom's searching method, it often may be a result of not configuring Zoom's weighting options to its most suitable settings for your site.

For example, if you have some large PDF documents containing many instances of the word "Sydney" then they may be swamping your results and you should be setting your 'Content density" weighting to "Strong adjustment". You may also want to give more preference to page titles and descriptions, or a preference to shorter URLs. Google has many of these options pre-configured.

Third, are you performing searches with the "match all searchwords" option enabled? You can set this to be the default if necessary.

Forth, if you are using the old V4 (as posting in this forum implies), you may consider trying out the new V5 which has many improvements, including the weighting and scoring of pages.

Finally, I should add that while it certainly would give nice results if the search engine could automatically attempt an exact phrase search first, for every combination of words in the query - and then rank those results higher than your single search word matches - it certainly would give very accurate results - the problem, as always, is that there is a compromise between performance and accuracy. Doing this would be very exhaustive (since we do not know where a phrase might begin or start - if a user enters in 6 words - does that mean we need to query every combination of phrases possible?). Even if we simply attempt a single exact phrase search for the query as a whole, it can add more load to our users' servers than they would like. Google has the benefit of designing their software for their particular hardware specifications (they have many many servers to distribute the load), but our software is designed to run on any of our users servers, which can range from top end equipment, to cheap $10/month shared hosting plans. But as indicated before, I don't think even Google is doing this, so it really wouldn't benefit too much in that people would not be fully expecting this behaviour in a variety of scenarios.

[Sparky]

Thankyou for your indepth response. I am using V5 Professional edition. I replied to this message as I did a search on the forum and found a related message. I didn't check o see which forum it was in.

My website www.hairsalons.com.au is provides a business listing where most searched are for suburbs. Unfortunately the Sydny page has at least 50 adresses which all contain the word Sydney. the North Sydney page has a lot less entries so it .

I have used weightings etc but can't seem to get the results I need.

After I posted yesterday, I edited the search.php file to force "quotes" around search entries. This is not ideal because if people don't type in words in exactly the correct order they don't get any results, however, as most users are searching for suburbs, it gives me a better set of results