Recommended Link issues

[Hex Angel]

Hey there,

A couple of issues I've run into using Recommended Links. First...

Zoom currently adds keywords entered into the Recommended Link dialog to the skip words list. At least, that's how the search behaves and what it reports when I search for such keywords. It would be useful if that was, instead, optional. (Try this search for "Daoism")
http://www.filmmakertees.com/search/fmtsearch.php?zoom_query=daoism

Second, if I create a Recommended Link for the keyword "daoism" and then search for the keyword pair "daoism flag" then the search will return results for "flag" but does not display the recommended links for "daoism". (EG this search for "Daoism flag")
http://www.filmmakertees.com/search/fmtsearch.php?zoom_query=daoism+flag

In some case, I've identified keywords for which I'd like to suggest links in addition to the search results. That doesn't appear possible with my installation. (5.1 build 1011)

Is there a change to search.php that will at least allow the recommended links to appear when the search does return results for one of the other keywords?

Cheers,

p.

[David]

Use are using a script called, fmtsearch.php.

This is not our script, and we don't know what it does, nor do we have the source code. So we can't really comment on it's behaviour.

I found our script on your site,
http://www.filmmakertees.com/search/search.php?zoom_query=daoism
But when executed it just indicates that you haven't uploaded all the index files.

Words used in recomended links are not added to the skip list by our software. So both this issue and the 2nd issue are proboably due to either your script or the missing index files.

[Hex Angel]

Actually, that's not quite what's happening in fmtsearch.php, which is just a template. It contains the line

<?php virtual ("fmt/search.php"); ?>

The search.php script is Zoom 5.1 (1011), with a few mods to how results that are returned by zoom are displayed but nothing that should affect skip words.

If you run http://www.filmmakertees.com/search/fmt/search.php, you'll see that the indexes are fine.

Cheers,

p.

[Ray]

Keywords entered in for recommended links do not normally behave as skipped words.

Have you checked if your Word Skip List (on the "Skip Options" tab of the Configuration window) contains an entry which might be causing it to be skipped?

For example, an entry such as "*ao" would cause it to skip "daoist" and "daoism".

Looking at your dictionary, there appears to be a long list of skipped words, alphabetically sorted. And this includes "dao", "daoist" and "daoism" at the very bottom. So I am suspecting these words are actually in your skip word list.

[Hex Angel]

Sorry, Ray, should have mentioned that I did check the skip-words list: dao, daoist and daoism are not in the list. And I use no wildcards in the list.

However, dao=daoism,daoist is in the synonym list.

Also, daoism and daoist are both in the recommended links list, but dao is not.

Perhaps an unusual interaction between two or all three of these lists: recommended, synonym, skip words?

p.

[Ray]

Ahh, I see. Sometimes it's hard to guess what's going on without seeing the configuration file and just basing on what we can see from the search page.

The problem here is that you have created a synonym entry where the target word "dao", was not actually indexed (i.e: it wasn't found on your web pages).

From the Help file:

A synonym definition has two fields:

1.Word: This is the word that the synonyms will be mapped to. It should be a word that actually appears in the content of your website.

2.Synonyms: This is a list of words separated by commas that will be considered equivalent to the indexed word. When a user searches for any of these words, they will get the same search results as if they searched for the indexed word. All occurrences of the words in this synonym list will also appear as a search result when you search for the indexed word.

Now this may be that the word "dao" doesn't actually ever appear anywhere on your website. In which case, you should create a synonym entry the other way around, with the first field set to a word that does appear, eg. "daoism=dao,daoist"

If the word "dao" does appear somewhere, it's likely that page was not indexed, and you'll want to check why it was skipped.

[Hex Angel]

Thanks Ray,

Ahh, I see too. "Dao" used to be on the site, but the pages which contained it have been migrated to another site. Similarly with daoism and daoist. Thus the need to create recommended links: visitors are still being directed to this site by search engines and links referring to daoist topics.

You might want to change "should" to "must" or otherwise explain that when synonyms do not appear in the site it may cause issues with other functions. It's not intuitive to me that listing synonyms for a word that does not presently appear on the site might cause that word, or its synonyms, to appear in the stop words list. That is, it would be preferable if the handling of synonyms were independent of whether the words appear in the index.

In any case, I'll remove the synonyms altogether if I'm not sure they appear in the site being indexed. Additionally I'll create a Recommended Link for each possible "synonym."

I'll try that and report back.

p.

[Hex Angel]

Yep. That got it. Everything seems fine now.

p.

[Ray]

Good to hear. We will update our documentation to stress the importance of the first word being something that appears in the content of the website.