Is there a way to display search stats automatically on my website?

[The Old Man]

Hi,
As the topic title says, is there a way to display search stats automatically on my website? I looked at the search report tool in Zoom and its very useful.

I wondered though if there is a way to included say top 20 search keywords on a website, based on the content of the log file?

If the log file was in XML it might open up more possibilities for easier manipulation of the data in live web pages, or even better perhaps an RSS/XML feed could be added to a future version containing the top x search key words or top x most recent search keywords? We could then include the contents of that feed or link to it on our search results pages?

Either way, thanks again for such a great product.

[johnwmpls]

On IIS

I have my an project setup to publish to an IIS file share. The search log and reports are set to automatically publish (through Zoom Search scheduled task) to a directory that the customers can access. Everything updates once a week, and it works like a charm.

[Ray]

As johnwmpls posted above, you can publish the log files generated by Zoom. You can schedule Zoom to generate these files, and if Zoom is running on your web server, then that can be written to a web hosted folder. If not, you may need to schedule a FTP program to upload the files (Zoom does not currently upload the stats files for you).

Extracting the data from the stats would be a different matter though. You can set the stats report to only return the top 20 searches in a table form, but not XML.

The log file itself is in CSV format, so you could script something to process the data as you like.

[The Old Man]

Thanks for the suggestions, I took a look and found the scheduler and reporting options but I can't install Zoom on my web server, the site is hosted in the US using normal shared web hosting and I'm in the UK.

Doing it all manually would be an alternative.

The report utility is very good but perhaps you could consider adding some RSS/XML feeds to output the results of the report in a future version? I'm sure many would find this output useful!

[Ray]

We'll add that to our list of things to consider for a future release. As you are the first person to ask for it though, it would currently be a low priority item.

[The Old Man]

Ok many thanks.

[dps1]

I too would like this feature so count another request.

[WizardFusion]

Another vote for me please.

[Ray]

Thanks for the feedback and votes. Just to let you know that we are paying attention to these posts, and it has got us thinking a bit more.

Naturally, the ideal output format for the statistics would depend on the intended usage. A XML file would require post-processing and fair amount of scripting on the user end to make proper use of it, and present the data to the end-user in a meaningful fashion. A RSS feed by itself would not seem to be of very much use, considering that the data would likely only contain the top x searches (specified in two columns: search term and number of searches). You would likely want to process it and add links back to your own search page for each search term, etc.

Can you elaborate on how you plan to use this XML output of the stats, and what data you would need? This would help us to determine what the most useful format would be.