Tagging

[Animal Makers]

I am sorry if this is the wrong forum, but I did not see another place that this might be appropriate to post.

I am looking at sites that have tagging. Tagging is a series of links that show common search terms that people use on your site.

An example site that uses tagging is at http://www.boardtracker.com. Now they have their own software that they wrote that does this. What I am hoping for is some way to allow this search engine software to generate this same feature in a dynamic way.

I have attached 3 pieces of a screenshot that shows what I am referring to on the above site. The first one shows the actual tags. If you click on one of them, it will perform a serch on the site based on that term. The second one just shows the search box and the category pull-down menu. The third one shows a text list of available categories and those link to everything that appears in that category.

[Ray]

First of all, I should clarify some terminology so we do not end up confusing anybody.

Tagging is actually, more typically referring to the ability to associate keywords with a page. This is essentially meta data, and similar to the use of meta keywords on HTML web pages. However, most sites implementing the new fad of "tag clouds" and such (as seen in the above website) store these tags in a SQL database so that they can be dynamically created and added to each page.

So it does not actually show "common search terms that people use on your site". It only contains tags which have been manually associated with pages on your site, and a "tag cloud" only shows the most popular tags (ie. the tags that have been associated with the greatest number of pages). It is not actually directly related to the searches made on a website except that you can search for the tags which have been created.

Having said all that, if what you really want is just a way to show the common search terms people have used on your site, and display them in a "cloud-like" manner, then this is certainly possible by writing a script which parses and analyzes the searchwords.log file created by Zoom (provided you have enabled the search words logging feature). Zoom's log file records all searches performed on your website and you can sort by any criteria you like (top searches, most results, category, etc.) and display them in whatever fashion you require.

However, if you are actually talking about an ability and interface to add tags to pages via Zoom, then this is a more complicated matter. This would mean that you would want the ability for end users to associate unique keywords to any page returned in the search results, and allow users to search these keywords dynamically. Essentially, it would require storing these tags in a database of some sort. In my opinion, this is really a feature that is more suited to a CMS (Content Management System), than a search engine.

[Animal Makers]

Well, I am not looking for anything complicated in concept. I was looking for a way to display a tag cloud on my search page that shows the most common search terms. However, I am no programmer so am unable to do this myself.

What I need is a script that runs when xx.php page is opened that looks at the search.log file and generates a tag cloud at the page.

Ideas?

[Ray]

I do not know of any already made script which parses a log file and generates a "tag cloud" accordingly. It would seem like a job for custom development, and you might want to look at hiring a programmer for it if you are unfamiliar with scripting. While it should be simple for experienced programmers, there are some parameters to consider, such as how far back into the log you wish to parse, and how to optimize it to make it fast (especially if you intend to have the cloud appear on many pages of your site), so it is not a task for beginners, I would imagine.

[Animal Makers]

Any chance that this might become a feature of Zoom down the road?

[Ray]

Unlikely at this point. You're the first to request it so there hasn't been much in the way of demand. It would also be a completely separate script from the search script, and it would need to be integrated into the user's own script which would exclude its usage for a portion of our users who run entirely static websites. Not to mention the variety of scripting platforms we would need to support (both PHP and ASP) to cater for everybody. So no, it doesn't seem to address a large enough portion of our user base (or potential user base) for it to make much sense as a feature of Zoom at this point.