Questions about Zoom Search - Javascript full text & boo

[Anonymous]

I am evaluating this product and have a couple of questions:

1. Does Zoom provide full-text search?
2. How about boolean search?

Any feedback would be much appreciated.

Thanks.

[David]

Yes, Zoom provides,
- Boolean search with boolean AND and OR
- Exact phrase matching
- Wild card searching (using * and ?)

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David

[Anonymous]

Thanks David.

Regarding boolean search, is this supported for JavaScript platform? If so, how do you make a boolean search. I have tried using " " to make and AND (like Google) but that didn't seem to work for me.

Thanks again.

[Ray]

A boolean AND search is available for the Javascript version, and it is performed by selecting the option "Match all search words". A boolean OR search is performed by selecting the option "Match any search words". These options are available in the default search form.

Using the double quote characters to enclose search words ("my search") does not perform a boolean AND search (nor in Google). Instead, it performs an exact phrase match, ie: both words have to appear in the same order as they are expressed in the phrase - therefore, "my search" will not match "search my", etc. The Javascript version does not support exact phrase matching. For the PHP, ASP, and CGI versions however, you can enable it in the Configuration window, under the "Search Page" tab.

[Anonymous]

Thanks Ray.

[Anonymous]

Hi,

Just wondering why the javascript version does not do exact phrase matching, is it not possible?

Cheers

Dave Stubbs

[Ray]

Javascript is technically restricted due to the fact that it is a client-side scripting language, and designed to run entirely within a browser (note that Javascript is very different to Java). Most browsers, such as Internet Explorer, limit the amount of memory which can be used by any single Javascript to something around 6 MB. This is very restrictive for something like a search engine, where you need to process a large amount of data.

While it is technically possible to provide exact phrase matching, it would increase the size of the index data required and thus restrict the scope and scalability of the Javascript version even more. There are implementations out there which do this, and they highly compromised on the number of pages and words they can index (eg. for some of these, you may only index and search 5 documents, if these documents happen to be several megabytes in size!). We believe this is too misleading to offer to our customers, as few users would know exactly how much index data they have, and it is difficult to estimate. Because of this, we chose to omit resource intensive features from the Javascript version, such as exact phrase matching and context descriptions.

We are however, always looking at other solutions that offer more powerful search features to CD/DVD users, and here are some that we've explored:
http://www.wrensoft.com/zoom/support...wto.html#cgicd