Wish List - Automatic page boosting by filename

[Daniel Yee]

If there was a way that you could automaticilly boost a page without having to edit every single one.

Like say I wanted to automatically boost every page that was welcome.asp +5.

[Ray]

Our current plans to improve the pageboosting feature will be based on an automatically determined "word density" of a page. That is, the more words there are on a page, the lower the page boost, and vice versa. This is designed to balance out the "swamping" of results by very large documents such as PDF files.

As for boosting based on filename however, we think this is a pretty rare requirement (few sites would have a massive collection of files with the same name which require boosting, and often they can be manually edited easily), so we have no immediate plans to add this.

[Daniel Yee]

The only thing I can think of to maybe help further my wish is this.
If you think about large scale companies that want to buy a search engine. And yours is one they are looking at vs. says Google and company z. One of your many benefits is the ease of installation and getting it up and running quickly without having to by more equipment.
But most companies don't care about money. They want functionality. Granted your software is WAAYYYY easier then Google as far as user customization. But as such we have over 50 directories on our site and all are “welcome.asp”. So if we could have away to automatically boost those pages, without having to go and edit them, cause to be frank I have more important stuff to finish, it would be a great benefit.

[sizbut]

Daniel,

If you really don't want your search engine to search all pages equally based on what the user is actually searching for (very strange), why not set the configuration to just index the "welcome.asp" pages.

[David]

Some other thoughts,

Do you have a standard header file that you include on these pages? If yes, then maybe you could just do a single edit in the header file.

If you don't have a included header file, then there are many products on the market that deal exactly with this problem.

For example even with the old Dreamweaver 4 software has a site wide find and replace function that will automate your task. I would guess it would take me 10 minutes at most to add the boost line to 50 selected pages using DW4 find and replace.

If you don't have DW, then have a look at,

Advanced Find and Replace
http://www.abacre.com/afr/

Text pipe, From another Australian software developer ,
http://www.crystalsoftware.com.au/textpipe.html

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David

[Anonymous]

boosting by file name

I think this would be a great addition. I'm using zoom search on an offline business management system which consists of an html front end and linked to this are quite a few hundred of our procedures and forms. The majority of users are using the search to find forms etc which are in word or pdf format and generally they know the name of the form (which is the file name) but when searching they are finding references to the form rather than the form itself.

Anyway - just to know that there are users who would have a use for this also

cheers

stubbsy

[David]

Stubbsy, your requirement is a different requirement from the rest of the post and I think you have mis-interpreted the initial post from Daniel Yee.

Daniel wanted every file with a particular name to always rank highly. For example he might have had 50 files called "welcome.asp" in different directories that were important for his site. So he wanted the content of selected files to be boosted in importance.

Your request is for a boosting of the importance of the file name for all files and a de-boosting of the relative importance of the content.

So as a longer term solution we could add a new file name boost option (like we have already for the page title boost).

In the short term you could fix the problem by seeding the documents with keywords. For example if the form was called A1234.doc, then you should include in text A1234.doc several times in the form itself (maybe in the header and footer) and in a .desc file if you use them.

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David

[Anonymous]

Hi,

yes you are correct, sorry. I found the title as I was searching for this problem and misinterpreted the first post.

If you could add that as an option though, to boost by filename, it would be appreciated.

cheers

Dave Stubbs

[David]

Yes, we will do this as part of V4.1 (or maybe V5 if we run out of time).

David