specifying web pages for Zoom to index

[dklauk]

I want to integrate Zoom Search Engine to a website such that it ONLY searches on a few .htm files and nothing else--not even the hoem page.

I need this approach as I want to search a large library of linked (to media player) audio files (.mp3, .wma) and find them via keywords.

So, what the ZSE should return in its search template page is, not the page which contains the linked audio file, but the list of links that matched the search criteria.

Hope this is clear.

Thanks.

[Ray]

Have you considered using Offline Mode? You can then ask Zoom to index the audio files specifically in the folders specified, and not worry about needing to crawl pages to find the links to these files.

If that's not possible, you can still tell Zoom to follow links on certain pages and not index them if you need to, though it might require more effort depending on your site. For example, you can add a page as an additional start point (by clicking on "More" in spider mode) with the option to "Follow links only"). Another option is to put ZOOMSTOP and ZOOMRESTART tags around the entire content of pages that you wish to exclude from index, but wish to have the spider follow the links within. Please see the Users Guide for more information on these features:
http://www.wrensoft.com/zoom/usersguide.html

[dklauk]

Thanks for the rapid response! I will try your suggestions as it seems like the ZSE will do what I need it to do and that is to give the website searcher just the list of hits (direct links to audio playback files) and not the list of pages that contain the links.

[dklauk]

I set up to do the Offline mode on files located in a specific folder (the .htm files containing the descriptions and links to do audio playback). The index and keyword search worked fine however the matches remove the <a href="firstaudiofile.wma">playback first file</a> from the displayed matches.

Is there a way to tell ZSE to "keep" <a href> links in tact so that a user could click a match in the results page and execute the media player?

Here's what ZSE search form shows:

Search results for: Prized


1 result found.

1. No title
... audio) Title of Series April 29, 2007 Sermon: What is Your Most Prized Posession? Author: Pastor Christian Hipp Apriil 22, 2007 Sermon: Biblical Reflections ...
Terms matched: 1 - Score: 4 - 2 May 2007 - URL: http://www.eastside4god.org/eResourcesItems1.htm

I need to have ZSE keep "What is Your Most Prized Possessom?" as a <a href> link so the user can click it to do the audio playback.

Thanks for any ideas on this.

Darold

[Ray]

No, you cannot have links within the context description of the search results. All HTML and formatting is stripped out - it is not practical nor useful in most cases, to maintain the HTML within each page description.

I thought you wanted to index the actual audio and media files though? As opposed to your example above, where you are actually indexing the HTML files that describe these meda files.

It seems to me that it would suit your usage more if you only index the audio files (removing .htm and .html from your extensions list all together) so that the search results would actually point directly to the audio files themselves. You can then make sure that the meta description within these files (Eg. the ID3 tags of the MP3 files) are up to date and contain meaningful searchable data (ie: titles, authors, etc.), and where not possible, you could create .DESC files for them, as explained here:
http://www.wrensoft.com/zoom/support...html#descfiles

[dklauk]

I see what you are saying now. Yes, it would be more practical to the site visitor to search on a word/phrase that then got indexed by ZSE directly fromt he .mp3.

Here's my dilemma: I am evaluating your product to ensure it does what my client needs it to do before I buy the Pro version. Since I have the free version it will not allow me to download the .mp3 plug-in to test your suggestions.

Can you grant me a 10-day or whatever length evaluation license so that I can do further testing before I spend the $99 to buy the Pro version? Or, enable me to download the .mp3 plug-in for this testing only?

Thanks.

Darold,
Owner of The WebPLUS Group

[David]

Can you grant me a 10-day or whatever length evaluation license

E-Mail us and we can send you a time limited eval.

[dklauk]

I have tested the features I needed to and it appears Zoom can do them. As I proceed toward the end of my evaluation I have the following question.

My client has already recorded a significant number of audio files in .wma format. Can Zoom support .wma files (with editable id tags) so that my client will not have to be burdened with converting and editing their .wma files? If not, will that feature be a in soon-to-be-releaed version--and when?

Thanks.

Darold

[David]

The indexing of meta data in WMA files is not supported at the moment. We do support searching MP3 files however.

It is an easy 5 min job to add the facility to index the file names of WMA files, so we will do this for the next patch release.

But it is probably several days of coding work to extract the meta data from inside the files. So we will add this to our list of candidate features for a future release.