Indexing only portions of a site

[TonyV]

Hi, Im new hear, and sorry, did not take the time to pour over posts to see if my question has already been answered.
I am wanting to know if I can control which pages are indexed in the search engine on a website.
for example I have a site that I want to create a search for. the site has voice talent, and I only want the option to search each of the talents pages.
is it possible to control a search so that it is only conducted in a folder, or subdirectory to a main site?
thanks for any input.
Tony V

[Ray]

Yes, certainly.

If you are indexing with Offline Mode, you would specify the folder you wish to index as your start directory. And only files and subdirectories under that would be indexed (use the "page and folder skip list" to specify any that you wish to exclude).

If you are indexing with Spider Mode, you should specify your start point so that the base URL is limited to the folder you wish to index within. Again, use the page/folder skip list to exclude subdirectories from being indexed.

You would probably want to download and have a look at the Users Guide for more information.

[TonyV]

Thanks Ray,
I am sure that I will have to purchase either standard or professional version to do what I want to do. But before I purchase I need to make sure I can in fact do it, or the easiest way to do what I want.

I want to set up a search for voice talent.
search query would be more then one option.
for example, age, gender, catagory, type, attitude etc.
as we have many options to choose from.. #1 can I have this many options in the search function?

and #2 I would like the results page to answer the query with a little info about the people who come up, but I would also like their audio example for that query to show up on the results page. so that each one can be clicked seperately to hear right on that results page. without having to go to each of the pages to hear it.

#2 Is this possible? if so, what is the easiest way to go about it.?

thanks for any input.
Tony V

[Ray]

I want to set up a search for voice talent.
search query would be more then one option.
for example, age, gender, catagory, type, attitude etc.
as we have many options to choose from.. #1 can I have this many options in the search function?

This may not be as simple as you think it is. We get a question like this every once in awhile in the forums (here's one example). Often, people fail to realize that this needs the data to be structured in a way such that these "options" or search criterias are well defined.

For example, this sort of data should really be stored in a SQL database, with a schema defined for age, gender, categories, attitudes, etc. If you have this, then you should be using a custom SQL query to make your searches, rather than depending on an external search engine. Your fields are unique to your own database, and no third party product would really achieve much more than writing your own SQL query.

If you do not have this data in a database, and in fact, you simply have the data written on static HTML pages, then you need to realize that this makes it impractical to search. For example, a page may contain mention of "Age: 31", but further below the page, it may have the person's address, "12 Someplace St., Somewhere". A search engine such as Zoom and Google, etc. only performs text based search on unstructured data. It would not be able to tell whether the age is 12 or 31 on that page.

Having said that, we're planning on adding something in V6 which would allow this distinction, but it would still require you to have this data structured in the HTML file and is more designed for sites where plain text search is required alongside structured-data searching. In your case, I would still think a database is more appropriate as it seems like the specific criteria should be the only things you need to search by.

and #2 I would like the results page to answer the query with a little info about the people who come up, but I would also like their audio example for that query to show up on the results page. so that each one can be clicked seperately to hear right on that results page. without having to go to each of the pages to hear it.

No, there's no audio preview feature bulit into Zoom for search results.

From the sound of things, you really need to find a developer to create a database driven site, with a custom searching facility. You are unlikely to find an off the shelf product that would do that specifically.