Bad search results

[alozier]

This may be several questions loaded into one, but here goes...

Basically I just want the search engine to return relevant results. For the purposes of our business, the terms in the title tag are absolutely the most critical, and we have taken great care in selecting those terms. So here is where I get puzzled.

www.residential-landscape-lighting-design.com/search/search.asp

Run a search on "mood lighting." You will see that the first result contains this term only once, in the footer. And the footer has been excluded, using the ZOOMSTOP and ZOOMRESTART tags. (See page source.) So that alone makes no sense to me. But then you have to go down to result #18 before you get anything close to relevant. (And we boosted the importance of the Title tag to the maximum, +5)

Now search "mood lights." Here the results are much better overall, though some are still puzzling. But you see results 4, 5 and 6 all have the exact term of the previous seach "mood lighting" in the Title. Why didn't these appear in the previous search?

So if you have any suggestions about why the search engine is still searching the footer (and in fact giving it a great deal of weight), or why the results are coming out so skewed, or how to improve all this, please let me know!

thanks,
--
Aaron Lozier
www.rlldesign.com
aaron@rlldesign.com

[alozier]

footer filtered - search results still suck

is there any way to make the title tag the truly highest factor? given scores that range up to 1000, a +5 boost does little to nothing. the engine seems to be giving high scores based solely on the size of the page.

thanks,
--
Aaron J Lozier
www.residential-landscape-lighting-design.com
aaron@rlldesign.com

[Ray]

1.) A couple of things to note. First of all, the first result we went to for that search (http://www.residential-landscape-lighting-design.com/home_lighting.htm) did not have a ZOOMSTOP tag to match the ZOOMRESTART tag. This would be why the footer is indexed.

Second thing is whether you are searching for "mood lighting" as two words, or if you had specifically enclosed them in double quote characters, and you have enabled Exact Phrase matching in the Zoom configuration window (under "Search Options"). Unless you are specifying the search as an exact phrase, it would match a page where the words "mood" and "lighting" appeared apart from each other, which it does so elsewhere in the content of this page.

2.) I would guess that the pages with "mood lighting" in the title are not showing up high in the results for that search because of the overall score (as you suggested in your second post). It is hard for us to see how big the score differences really are on your site as you have disabled them from being displayed in the search results. However, you can zip up your search files and email them to us if you want us to take a closer look.

3.) Another thing you might want to check is if you have uploaded ALL search files at the end of your most recent indexing session. This should normally be the case if you let Zoom upload the files, however, if you are uploading the files yourself with a seperate FTP client, you may have left out a file or two from being uploaded, which means that you might be mixing index files from different sessions. This could lead to varying unexpected behaviour, and it could be the cause of your problem. A simple way to check is to look at the search files on your server and make sure they are all dated the same (or very closely) to each other.

And lastly, a large page would only score highly if the search phrase appears on it many times. If the search phrase only appears once or twice, the scoring would not be affected by the size of the page. What you should note however, is that if you are not searching for exact phrases (with double quotes) then either of the words in "mood lighting" can be appearing many times on a page and affecting the results. ie: even if the word "lighting" only appears once on the page, but "mood" appears 10 times on the page, then the score would be high.

Another tip - if you are re-indexing immediately after changing content (eg. putting in and taking out ZOOMSTOP tags etc.) you might want to turn off the cache to ensure that you are not indexing a cached copy of a web page. You can do this by clicking on "Configure" -> "General" -> "Reload all files (do not use cache)"