Limit Context Description

[uddybay]

Can the context description be set to show only the item that it finds? My web page is set up as a book catalog. Each book is listed in a separate cell and an author for that book in the cell to the right of the book title. For example, if I search for the book title, "Animal Stories", it will show the title and the author from the previous book. I want to limit the context description to the title and the author after that title.

Try a search for "Animal Stories" at http://www.theosophiabooks.com. It will find the book but it shows H P Blavatsky as the author. The true author is Florence DeGroat.

Thanks
Buddy

[David]

Zoom doesn't know the semantic difference between a book title and the author. To Zoom they are all just words and Zoom just displays the context around where the search word is found.

If you have a authors names both before and after the book title, then yes it might be confusing. You can however adjust the Context Size in Zoom. This is the number of words surrounding the searched word that should be displayed as part of the context description. The default is 30.

If you display more context is might be less confusing for the user, as they will see it is a list of books and authors.

Long term however you might be better off with a structured database solution. Then you could search by title or author or religious category or price, etc.. (Amazon style).

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David

[uddybay]

Thanks for the info and advice David. I assumed that Zoom could not distinguish between a book title and an author. I also assumed that there is a statement or feature in the coding that tells Zoom to display so many characters before and so many characters after the found word or phrase when displaying context description. If this is so, then I also assume that the code can be modified so that only characters after the found word or phrase will be displayed.

[David]

You can adjust the size of the context. But you can't adjust the starting point as it is determined automatically. To do what you want would require custom software development.

I don't think your proposed solution would solve your problem in any case. Either a search for title or a search for author would produce misleading results.

I think the quick and easy solution to to enlarge the size of the context. The more complete solution is to implement a structured database solution.

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David