More weight to HTML files?

[AJArend]

Is there any way that I can give more "weight" to my HTML files in the results of my search than to other formats like PDF? I've noticed that in many of my searches, PDFs will come up first, and my boss would like HTML files listed first.

AJ

[David]

Which version of Zoom are you using?

PDF files tend to appear at the top of search results because PDF files are often very large multi-page documents. They contain a lot of words which tend to match search engine queries and make them seem more relevant. Zoom thinks that if a document contains 100 occurrences the search word, it must be more relevant that a document with only 10 occurrences of the searched for word.

Version 4.1.1000 and later include a "Automatic content density weighting adjustment" feature. This automatically adjusts the weighting of words found in a file depending on the density of its content. This helps prevent large files (such as PDF documents with 50+ pages) from always appearing as the most relevant result, and gives greater priority to smaller documents. How this effect operates can be adjusted from the "indexing options" tab in the Zoom configuration window.

With "Standard adjustment", the weighting of words found in a large file will be lowered so as to prevent such files from swamping the results and always considered the most relevant. This will effectively give preference to small and medium sized documents. "Strong adjustment" provides an even greater level of scaling, and "No adjustment" would disable this feature so that all files are treated equally.

You can also boosts ALL words found on specific pages, by use of the ZOOMPAGEBOOST meta tag, eg.

<meta name="ZOOMPAGEBOOST" content="5">

Putting this on the most important pages on your site would help make them appear higher up in the search results. You can probably use less than 5 to do the same thing on a small site.

Similarly, a negative value would decrease the weight of words on that page. You can add a negative ZOOMPAGEBOOST to PDF files using the .desc file feature. See the Users Guide for details about .desc files.

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David