CGI indexing and meta data

[kosmo101]

Hello,

When we use the CGI option on the Zoom indexer, we get a nice rss feed which seems to grab the title of the page and then puts the meta description in the alt text like when you rollover the link. That is fine but is there a way to have the meta description show below the link text (which is the title tag) and if so how do you do this? I am not so great with the RSS descriptor nor CGI. Im surprised I got this far. Im just not understanding with the CGI/RSS option how it is setup to return only the title as the link and nothing else. I guess thats the point of RSS but in the way we are using it as suplemental results.. is there a way to add in the description preferably in smaller font than the link text.

Thanks

Kevin

[Ray]

We found a previous thread you started on this topic here:
http://www.wrensoft.com/forum/showthread.php?t=2751

The answer is the same as what I posted there really.

Meta descriptions will show up under the title for RSS feeds. The question is, do you actually have any meta descriptions on the pages you indexed? The last time we looked at your site, there weren't any.

Note the difference between meta descriptions and context descriptions.

A meta description is a tag that looks like this in the mark up for your page:

<meta name="DESCRIPTION" content="this is my page's meta description">

Context descriptions are extracted from the content of the page, and it changes depending on the word you search for. This is also returned in the RSS/XML results but it's returned as <zoom:context>...</zoom:context>. However, IE will only display <description>...</description> values alongside item titles, and this is strictly only for meta descriptions.

So to achieve what you requested, on your site, you simply have to make sure you have meta description tags on your pages, and make sure you are indexing meta descriptions.

Note that how a RSS feed is rendered and displayed is entirely dependent on your browser, and it's rarely used as something that's presented directly to the end user. The RSS feed is usually picked up by another application or script, and it should parse and present its layout independently. The way that it is read by a web browser tends to be the least interesting because if you're using a browser to access the page, you might as well be accessing the HTML version of the page which is actually designed for presenting in a browser.