Great Search!!! - Frameset indexing

[swips]

Just need to complement the developers of Zoom Search.

What a great site search this is!! I am not a web design person per say, but am the one who is doing our company web site since it really needs to be an in-house endeavor due to constant changes required. Also, when we do it ourselves it retains the proper image or feel for our industry, in other words we know what our visitors are pretty much "thinking" or looking for when they are browsing our site.

In a couple days I had a nice customized site search. I am still tweaking and personalizing it to provide the results we want. It is great to be able to quickly re-index offline then ftp the index results set to the web server and immediately see how results display. I can make a quick change to configuration settings then re-index and all within a few minutes see how the search functions!! Our previous site search was a challenge from day one and for years it never really gave the results or look we wanted anyway. We finally dumped it when the indexer (server side) stopped indexing and the developer wanted us to upgrade to "repair" it.

I believe a bad search feature is worse than no search feature at all. Visitors will give up if they can not find it on your site or just go to a major search engine and find what they are looking for elsewhere.

With medium to large sites a search feature is a necessity. We find once you have a search feature easily accessible, visitors will use it more than a menu system regardless of how flashy the menu is! Have you noticed how many people even browse to sites through a search engine such as google even when they know the url of the site they are going to! BTW, Why any commercial site would place a major search engine like google or yahoo search on their site is a mystery. Why would you want to drive your visitors to other sites??? We used to have atomz site search until they started adding other web related search results to the results page. They never alerted to us that this was happening as a change of policy. After that we went with an in house search engine and never will do otherwise.

As I work with Zoom Search and adjust our web pages over the coming weeks I am sure I will become more familiar with it and find some things I would like changed. In general, I would request that the more controls available in this program for filtering, ordering, relativizing or customizing results is a priority for the improvement wish list. This is what makes this search so good to begin with, so keep enhancing it further! For instance one thread here mentioned being able to have Zoom search use the robots noindex tag, as other searches use, would seem to be an item that needs addressing immediately.

Another thing I would like to do with this search:
Provide a separate results set or related message based on immediate previous few searches by same visitor.

[David]

Thanks for the positive feedback.

Even though we only released V5.0 a few weeks ago. We are starting to collect a list of changes that we plan to do for V5.1. The robots noindex tag is one of those things. In the meantime you are get the same effect by using the skip list.

There are already a fair number of settings for filtering and ranking. What is it that you think needs improving?

I am not exactly sure what you mean by providing a separate result set based on previous searches. How is the separate set different from the main set and what is the trigger for displaying it (or stopping to display it)?

[swips]

I have not had the time until now to revisit this.

One thing I am now having trouble with is that I noticed many pages' content are not being indexed perhaps because their content is in tables. I use NOF for page design and that program uses tables extensively for layout reasons.

I suspect the real issue may be this though:
The site also has frames so to avoid having ZOOM SEARCH index and linking to body only pages I have used the page exclude function for any page name with "body" or "left" in it. Well this has resulted in a very small results set indexed and most of the content on the pages is in the "body_....." part of the page.

How to use zoom search effectively with a site built with frames?? where I have a "mysite/left_page.html" and a "mysite/body_page.html" and a "mysite/page.html" page
The real content is in the "mysite/body_page.html"

Regarding my question about extra result set:
For instance if the site visitor searches for "A" then searches for "B" this visitor will probably have interest in "C" though it may not really be what he is looking for so it should not subplant "B" search results set but instead ammend it as topic of interest subset.
Key searchwords would trigger this based on what we see in logs. We know what majority search terms are being used from these logs and understand why visitors are searching those terms so we could enter these key searchword combinations as triggering another result set or even a canned message.

thanks

[David]

HTML Frameset indexing and page redirection

Tables will not prevent content being indexed.

The use of frames has somewhat gone out of fashion on web sites because they cause a whole bunch of usability issues.

However if you have blocked all pages that contain the word 'body' in their name, then you can't expect the content of those blocked body pages to be indexed.

Your problem isn't just with Zoom. You have a general problem of stopping people seeing the body page outside of your frame set. I haven't used frames for a long time, but I think the current recommended approach among web designers is add some Javascript to all the body pages to,

1. Detecting whether or not page has been loaded within its frameset.
2. Redirecting or reloading the page so that it loads itself within its intended frameset.

There is a detailed explaination of this Frame Protection / redirect method here.

Then you can index all your pages with Zoom and people will be forced back into the framset if they enter a un-framed URL.

The long term solution is not to use frames however.

[David]

Your suggestion about extra result sets might already be covered by the V5 recommended links feature.

[whisperinghill]

Web link update.
It is actually www.digitalroom.net/javascript/frame.html

Though a great pointer

[David]

Thanks, I fixed the link in my previous post.