Complex search question - multicriteria search

[RyanL]

I have the $99 version of Zoom - love it, by the way!

Let me explain what I am trying to do, which should make my question more clear.

I am putting up a site that will have a bunch of jobs advertised on it. Employers will put things like salary, city, position, etc. in their ad.

I would like to be able to set up a search where the person searching can search within a given range of options, for example:

Salary: Would have 5 different ranges and they could select ALL or a certain range.
City: Could select any specific city or leave it blank.

Similar to what a real estate agent might have or even Monster.com.

Is this possible?

[David]

To do what you want to do you really need a SQL style database. With all the data carefully formatted and placed into the correct database fields. Then you can do a structured field based database query.

Zoom (like Google, Yahoo and others) is a free text search engine designed to deal with unstructured data. Which mean that it isn't able to know if a figure on a web page, '$100' for example, is a weekly salary, the price of a taxi ride, or something else altogether.

As another example. imagine a page had the following text. "Jobs are available in London, Paris, Eastern Coast USA, but the position in Sydney is no longer available". People wanting jobs in New York would not find this add. But people looking for work in Sydney would find this add. Of course this is a fictitious example, but it illustrates the problem of trying to extract the correct meaning from unstructured data.

Using a database forces structure on your data. Which makes it easy to query ranges of data and use the semantics of the data.

[RyanL]

Got it - thanks for your time - I will look into that further.