Newb with a couple (easy) questions.....

[warcrow]

Hello everyone,

I'm in the market for a search engine for an internal webpage I've made. It's pretty small (50-75 pages), but has the poteniol to be bigger in the years to come. I DL the free Zoom stuff and so far, I'm pretty impressed with how well it's worked so far (had it one day) and how easy it was to set up.

But I do have some questions that I hope someone can answer.

1) The indexing is great, but I do have a section of the website that it password protected. I realize that the spider (method I used to discover content) crawler couldnt reach it (as expected). Is there a way I can arm the spider with a password so that it can discover this teritory?

2) I'd like to add a small search box on the main page for users to use (much like the one located at the top of this forum), instead of them clicking through a link to get to a search page.

3) I'd like to exclude the main page from indexing, as it's always the #1 hit on all searches since there are so many links on it--I poked around the wizard and interface and couldnt quite figure it out. Maybe it's because I have a free version?

4) Is there a reporting method for an admin to see what the most popular searches are?

I realize that some of these questions might be trivial--but I really do appreciate it. So far I like the product and am interested in purchasing the professional version if things pan out.

Cheers,
-Mark

[Jerren]

1) under the configuration look for the authentication tab, you can provide the Zoom Spider with the credentials that way or you can index the site in "offline" mode which will allow you to specify the directory path of your website and index the pages directly from the OS which might be easier.

2) Read the FAQ section on the main page, there is a code snipet you can use to do this there.

3) I can think of three ways to do this:

First you can add the Zoom Stop and Zoom Start tags in your page to have the engine skip the sections of those files you do not want to be indexed. Search the Manual for more information on the ZOOMSTOP and ZOOMSTART.

Secondly if you are using the spider to index the site, simply add the file to the robots.txt file to prevent Zoom from indexing it.

Third if you are indexing in off line mode you can just omit the main page from the list of files/directories you want to index.

4) Yes there are built in reports you can run from the main console that generate a nice HTML page with a variety of usage stats. In the main zoom console go to tools and select "Search Statistics report" and point it to the zoomlogfile on your site and select the information you want in the report. If you want to automate this look under the FAQ section for info about the zoom scheduler.

[warcrow]

Thanks, Jerren, for the prompt response! Those answers were incredibily helpful!

Also, if I want to have a search/index for two websites--do I need to aquire a new license or can you create different indexes? I ask this because we have a section (of the same website) that is only for IT personell. It's password protected. But I really wouldnt want search hits to show up for the users, but I would like to create a search index for the IT page.

I assume it's easiest to configure and treat this like a seperate webpage?

[David]

In addition to the answers by Jerren,

1) There is also this FAQ on Authenication & password protection.
Q. How do I index protected parts of my website requiring user authentication?

2) Here is the FAQs Jerren is refering to.
Q. How do I add search boxes to my web pages?
Q. How do I create search forms with images for buttons, etc.?

3) Be careful becuase if you skip the home page, the spider might not find other pages that were linked to the home page. So some pages might be missed. Maybe adjust the ranking down instead. With a meta tag like,
<meta name="ZOOMPAGEBOOST" content="-3">

4) See also this FAQ about turning on logging.
Q. How do I enable search word logging?

...search/index for two websites--do I need to aquire a new license...

Probably not. See this FAQ
Q. What are the licensing policies for Zoom?

I assume it's easiest to configure and treat this like a seperate website

Probably. You might be able to use categories, but that doesn't protect the content very well.

[warcrow]

Thanks for the info, guys--I'm putting in a request to management to purcahsed the Professional Edition.

I might have more questions in the future, but for now I want to, once again, thank you guys for the prompt and very helpful responses!

[warcrow]

Hrm, for some reason I cannot seem to index two different websites so that they appear in the same search. In short--how do index two seperate websites into one search?

[David]

Add a new start point. (Click on the more button in the main Zoom window)

[MergeThis]

As to Jerren's initial response, it's ZOOMRESTART, not ZOOMSTART.


Good luck,
Leon