Preliminary V6 feature list and details

[David]

This thread is now closed as we have created a whole new section in the forum for V6.

[Ray]

You can see a working demo of the Custom Meta Fields feature in Zoom V6 here:
http://www.wrensoft.com/zoom/demos/f...ed_search.html

You can click on "Submit" and do an empty search when this feature is enabled, and it will list all results.

Actually, I just noticed that we hid all the other meta fields except for "Price" from being displayed in the search results in this demo. Normally, they would all show up, but I think we decided it looked a bit too busy. This explains the reason for your question. They were simply suppressed from being displayed with CSS here - if you view the HTML source, you will see:

.result_metaname_AVAILABILITY { display:none; }
.result_metaname_ORIGIN { display:none; }
... etc.

So yes, the answer is you can select which custom meta fields to display in the search results.

[AndrewD]

Availability of metadata in search results

Will the v6 search process present its results in a form that allows display of selected file metadata, as well as arbitrary searching of metadata fields?

We use Zoom primarily for indexing/searching pdf files. We have meticulously set up accurate author metadata, as well as other fields such as keywords. I would like to be able to include the contents of these fields in the displayed results, with some control over how the data are displayed.

[Ray]

What you refer to is more commonly known as "auto-suggest" or "auto-complete". It uses AJAX/Javascript and it can significantly increase the load on your server (because it needs to make many multiple requests).

Given these disadvantages, it would not really suit the majority of users - especially those on shared hosting. Sites like Google, YouTube, and Apple have serious dedicated hardware hosting their websites and can afford the load.

Other sites use third-party services like SurfWax LookAhead, which charges you at a rate based on the number of searches made per day. So it is really a more costly feature than you may think. Having said that, you could probably use LookAhead with Zoom if you wanted to.

[Garvin]

Rather than waiting for after you click the search button to get suggestions, while you type in the search box you get suggestions.

[Ray]

In V5, there are already Spelling Suggestions for misspelled words, and also Recommended Links, which allow you to suggest specific links for specific phrases and queries.

Can you elaborate on what your suggestions would look like and how they differ from the existing features?

[Garvin]

One of the great features that could be included is "Search Suggestions", it would be a excellent feature as most search engines and online searches offer that feature now, examples could be found on these websites Apple, Adobe and YouTube.

would love to see something like this added.

[David]

Maryjili, see my comments in the other duplicate thread you have open on the same topic.

[maryjili]

Would you please send me a copy of the current 64bit zoom to use? I do need it to do my work. I am running the indexer on windows web server 2008 x64 and have 6G ram installed, I can add more rams if needed. Thanks.

[David]

We'll be looking at a native 64bit release after doing the 32bit beta (As pointed out above however the 32bit build runs fine on 64bit operating systems). We aren't aware of any customers that really need 64bit at the moment. Some customers have asked about it, and it would be nice to have, but few actually seem to need it.

For all 32bit Windows software the maximum available RAM that can be used by the application's process is 2GB. The limit is due to the size of the Windows virtual address space. (but can be changed to 3GB with some trickery)

But RAM is only a small part of the problem. A much bigger problem is the 32bit addressing used in the index files. Using 64bit addressing in the index file would double the space requirements for some the internal structures. Making the index files significantly larger, less efficient and thus slightly slower. And they would be potentially incompatible with the index files from 32bit systems (as old Linux systems can't handle files larger than 2GB, which is the limit of 32bit file addressing).

Also scripting languages haven't caught up with 64bit yet. As far as I know, there are no official ASP and PHP builds that allow 64bit RAM use and 64bit file pointers. So we don't know how to move the ASP and PHP options to 64bit (or even if we should bother trying).

So in short, it isn't trival and there isn't any demand.

[maryjili]

And what is the current maximum RAM v6 can actually make use of?

[maryjili]

When will the 64bit V6 alpha be available?

[David]

The CGI is now significantly more complex than it was, as we have added a bunch of new features, plus the same code base should also be able to be used for ASP.NET and FastCGI.

We haven't done any testing of V6 on PowerPC hardware or Sparc hardware as yet. But there is no reason why it shouldn't be able to work as well or better than V5 on this big endian hardware.

[dbuck]

Yes, we will be releasing an SDK to V6 as well, sometime after the public V6 release.

This is great! Also, will the CGI still be compilable on big endian machines? (i.e. have the extra includes, etc. - we were able to adapt the solaris options to compile on linux-ppc.)

[Ray]

Yes, we will be releasing an SDK to V6 as well, sometime after the public V6 release.