RSS Feeds, breadcrumbs and document size questions

[Zeb]

Hello everyone, I'm the Intranet Developer for a local media company in New Zealand. I'm in the process of writing up a concept document for a new search engine for my company's Intranet, with the mind to present Zoom as an alternative to building the search engine in-house.

Just three questions really:

1) I like the idea of the RSS feature and one of it's uses I can see is allowing our Corporate Communications people to update a "news reel" section of the site and have this news reel indexed and fed out via RSS to various reader options our staff have access to e.g. Outlook 2007, in-house on desktop reader, Intranet homepage.
The question is, can Zoom Search ONLY index and return a certain section of a site without the need of "user input" or bringing up results from other sections of the Intranet?
Say our Corp Comms people write an article about how well the company is tracking, can Zoom Search recognise that there has been a "change," then automatically index and update the RSS feed/list?
I'd still want a seperate search for the whole Intranet site, but also a secondary search function just for this one section... but NOT present it as a category or an option people can choose to search from (if that makes sense?)

Can you also give me ideas on how else the RSS feature of Zoom Search can be used (it'll help me suggest more company-tailored ideas!)

2) In the search results that are presented, can you create a "bread crumb" trail? i.e. the navigational path that this search result resides in.

3) I know you can tell the searcher the size of the document, but can you tailor it to show the size in mb or kb instead of bytes like I've seen so many search engines do?

Thanks, and I really hope you don't mind if I ask more questions as I get them

[Jerren]

answer for Q#1

Well I only feel qualified to answer the RSS question as I am actually working on that piece at the moment.

Yes you can have the zoom engine automatically run on a scheduler, they provide a scheduling tool and a handy FAQ to walk you through the process: http://www.wrensoft.com/zoom/support/scheduling.html

I think the main driver for corporations using RSS feeds is the ability for the RSS client to determine what content is new or changed since the user last viewed it. This allows users to get caught up quickly without having to browse though a lot of information they have already read. Some interesting uses I have seen recently:

• HR departments puting policy manuals on RSS feeds - no excuse for not knowing which policies have changed in the electronic handbook...
• FAQ documents by IT and helpdesk organizations - I even had one client use it for scheduled outages

There are many more examples but you get the idea.

Best of luck to you.

[David]

Q1:
You need to launch the indexer before it will notice new content. In addition to scheduling you can also do incremental indexing.

To limit results you can use categories, or create two seperate sets of index files. In the case of categories you can pass in the category in the URL to avoid getting results from other categories.

You can also sort by date to get the new articles first. But you always need to pass in a search word of some sort. Even if this is a word that is common to all pages.

Q2:
The URL can to presented in the search results. But if you wanted anything more fancy, like the URL being parsed into folders and the file name, then you would need to write your own code to do this.

Q3:
I think we alway present the document size in KB. It rare that you get web pages and documents on the web > 10MB. So KB is OK most of the time. it would be a simple code change to modify this behaviour however.

[Ray]

You can also sort by date to get the new articles first. But you always need to pass in a search word of some sort. Even if this is a word that is common to all pages.

Just wanted to add that this may not necessarily mean you need "user input" as such. You can hard-code a user query as part of the URL to the search script, so you could link to the page like the following, to get all pages containing the word "manuals":
http://www.mysite.com/search.php?zoom_query=manuals

[Zeb]

Hi all thanks for the feedback.
Its been some time since I posted this question and there have been quite a few changes. Zoom is still in the arena, its more a case of getting the company to approve the project!