Any Chance for Context in JS Mode

[whk]

Ray - I know this is an old topic but things change. Is there any chance a feature will be added to allow context descriptions in js mode - at least for html files if not for pdf files? I haven't checked many other search engines but I know of one that can do this. I prefer Zoom for other reasons but the context display would be great. My ISP doesn't support PhP etc., maybe I'll have to change ISPs.
Walter K.

[David]

Displaying context requires all the text in the document to be held in the index. This makes in the index larger. Javascript can't process much data because it is restricted by how much RAM it can allocate. So it can't deal with large index files.

Large index files also means a long download time for the script, (as JS runs in your browser client side, not server side). So if we did include the context feature you would be limited to searching a very small number of files.

Even as it is, without context, you are limited to searching a few thousand files before you run out of RAM in your browser. We feel that futher limiting the capacity of the Javascript option is counter productive.

[Ray]

We are aware of other products which provide a Javascript-based search engine with context description. But note that they purposely fail to provide any specific numbers on the limitations (max. number of pages, etc.) which they can search through. This is because such a feature makes this very hard to predict (it depends alot on the content you have indexed), and as David mentioned above, is significantly crippling on the capacity possible (most of the others we have seen, in fact, only index up to 90 pages or less - on sites with larger files, they may well only index up to 10 pages!).

We feel that it is misleading to provide a product with such a counter productive feature - most of our users expect to be able to index a much larger amount of files, especially as their site grows. So no, these circumstances have not changed.

I'd recommend you look for an ISP that provides server-side scripting. Even the most basic hosting packages provide some form of server-side scripting these days (be it PHP, ASP or CGI). Javascript is really only recommended for running on CD-ROMs, DVDs, or locally on your computer - where there is no download time. For online websites, server-side scripting is most definitely the better and most suitable choice.