Another multiple sites question.

[corchard]

I have an intranet site (corp) and an internet site (www).
I'd like to have the corp search engine index and return results from the www site.

Both sites are being spidered as separate start points.
Both sites have many possible subdomains in which to qualify as base urls.

My custom asp search form has multiple categories for the corp site and allows the user to select using a select list.
An additional category is called "search our www site" and matches the pattern of all the subdomains/base urls used in the www site and uses the option to use "Files belonging to this category can not belong to any other category."

I had expected that would mean if you chose "All" categories the "search our www site" would have been excluded but it is not.

I had added an additional check box to the search form, under the category select list with as
<input type="checkbox" name="zoom_cat[]" value="27" /> (where 27 is the "search our www site" category) Figuring it would add the category to the search parameters as in where there is a search multiple categories option enabled, but it does not.

What I'd like is users' ability to:
1) Search our corp site (or categories therein)
2) Search our corp site (or categories therein) AND our www site
or
3) Search our www site alone

Is there an easier way to do this?

Cheers,

Chris

[Ray]

An additional category is called "search our www site" and matches the pattern of all the subdomains/base urls used in the www site and uses the option to use "Files belonging to this category can not belong to any other category."

I had expected that would mean if you chose "All" categories the "search our www site" would have been excluded but it is not.

I'm not sure why you expected it to be excluded - since "search our www site" is the name of one of your categories, searching for "All" categories should naturally include this?

I had added an additional check box to the search form, under the category select list with as
<input type="checkbox" name="zoom_cat[]" value="27" /> (where 27 is the "search our www site" category) Figuring it would add the category to the search parameters as in where there is a search multiple categories option enabled, but it does not.

Can you show us your customized search form? I don't see any reason why that would not work unless it was added in the wrong place or your value doesn't match.

What I'd like is users' ability to:
1) Search our corp site (or categories therein)
2) Search our corp site (or categories therein) AND our www site
or
3) Search our www site alone

I might be missing something, but it sounds like this should work with your current approach.

1) Search by selecting one of the corp categories
2) Search by selecting "All"
3) Search by selecting "Search our www site" category

If your first option was to mean that the user needs to search the entire corp site (excluding the www site), then you could create a new category, similar to your "Search our www site" one, but for the corp site - containing all the base URLs for your corp site. It should also NOT have the "Files belonging to this..." option enabled so that the same pages can then be categorized into the corp categories.

Note also that the order of your categories can be of importance when using the "Files belonging to this category cannot belong to other categories" option. The files are categorized by the order they appear in the list (in the Configuration window). So if a category higher up grabs the file with this option, then categories below will not get it. Likewise, if its the other way around, the file might be filed in other categories before getting to the mutually exclusive category. See the Help file for more details.