End User Documentation

[Scott]

Is there any end user tips which demonstrates the features of the actual search. These tips would explain to an end user the regular expression rules for searching. The Wildcard features, quote features, and any other tricks the end user can use in their search query would be described in these tips.

[Ray]

Here are some searching and indexing tips you might be able to adapt for your users. Note that some of these depend on how you have configured your search engine.

- You can use "*" and "?" wildcards to search for multiple words (eg. "w*" will match all words beginning with 'w')

- Common words (or words entered into the Skip Words list) will be ignored from the search.

- Select "match any word" to perform a boolean OR search with the words entered. Select "match all words" to perform a boolean AND search with the words entered.

- You can enclose two or more search words in quotation marks to get an "exact phrase" match, where the words must appear in a certain order to count as a match. Common/skip words in a quoted phrase will be included in the search.

- You can combine exact phrase searches with single word searches.

- Search words are not case sensitive (by default - unless configured otherwise).

- You can search by individual categories, or across all categories. (if categories are enabled).

If you have prices, serial numbers etc. on your website, you should enable "word join" for characters such as hyphen ('-') and dots ('.'). This would allow for specific searching of "2.0" or "abc-1234" etc.

[gfineman]

Wildcards within phrase

Two powerful features that are mentioned are searching for an exact phrase and wild card searching. Wildcard is important to get all word forms so that plumb* will get plumbing, plumber and plumbers. It is the alternative to the 'stemming' feature found in some other search engines.
The phrase search is also powerful and is described as enforcing an order on the words being searched for.

However, when I try to use a wild card in an exact phrase, it fails with a 500 server error. For example, "plumbing repair?" to get plumbing repair or repairs. Is this what Wrensoft expects? An internal Server error screen seems harsh.

I am using the CGI version of 4.2.1002 for Linux with off line indexing.

Gabe Fineman, Washington, DC

[Ray]

Wildcards within exact phrases are not supported, however, it should never return a 500 server error, so this is most likely a bug in the CGI/Linux version. We will look into this and have it fixed in the next build (4.2.1002).

As an additional note to the original post, there is now a documented list of search features/tips available at:
http://www.wrensoft.com/zoom/support/searchtips.html

[gfineman]

End User Documentation Samples

A have a mirror of a Yahoo discussion list that uses Zoom to preindex and search its 25,000 messages. A sample of the end-user documentation I use is at http://www.cpposts.com/example. Hopefully others will post links to documentation they have so that a new user can get a starting point for a variety of methods to explain searching.

-Gabe Fineman
Washington, DC

[Stripe-man]

so you are saying that all search features are listed on this page?

http://www.cpposts.com/example/SearchHelpCP.shtml

[gfineman]

so you are saying that all search features are listed on this page?

http://www.cpposts.com/example/SearchHelpCP.shtml

No. Each site has its own needs and orientations as it uses different features of Zoom. As Scott pointed out, there are no examples of end-user documentation for a site administrator to use as a starting point to develop what is most useful for his/her users.

Ray wrote some explanations of the main features, but, because his audience is everyone, he was very non-specific. My hope is that others will post (or point to) their examples and the collection will help new users.

My example was for unsophisticated users (hence a tutorial on search basics). Can you contribute an example?

-Gabe Fineman

[Stripe-man]

I will be happy to as soon as I write one! LOL

[Rick Parsons]

Example end user help page

I was looking for exactly the same thing, so to contribute to the knowledge, here is my first draft of "Search Tips" for the punters at my site.

http://west-penwith.org.uk/searcht.htm

(p.s. Zoom search is not fully implemented at this site yet so you could find yourself using a competing product until I have finished doing it )

(URL above edited 6 Oct to reflect permanent location now Zoom is in production.)

[Rick Parsons]

Ray said earlier

- Search words are not case sensitive (by default - unless configured otherwise).

But I can't find the configuration option for this anywhere. Could someone point it out for me please.

[Ray]

To turn on case sensitivity (which mean that a search for "trees" will not find the word "Trees" on a webpage), check the option to "Support single-case languages" on the "Languages" tab of the Configuration window.

It is generally recommended to leave this option off for all latin-based languages where upper and lower case differences should be ignored. The feature is designed mainly to cater for east-asian languages where there are no upper/lower case variants for any character.

[Rick Parsons]

Thanks, knew it had to be these somewhere. Bit of a side effect that one.

That suggests a feature request: I have been using in the past a search feature which works as case-insensitive if the search word is all lower case but case-sensitive if it contains any capitals.

The benefits of this feature are for proper noun searches - e.g. places and names, so that a search for Cook, the name, would not pull in all the recipies and chefs.

[Ray]

Interesting idea, and something we could consider. We have a long list of things to add however, so as with most feature requests, it depends on how much user demand we have for this feature.