Searching this page only

[gefjo]

Can I use categories (or any other means) to offer the option to search all / search this page only?

[David]

We are a bit confused by what you mean by search, "this page only". A search engine that only searches a single page doesn't seem all that useful.

Also, you can search the current page loaded in a browser using CTRL-F on the keyboard.

Maybe we are missing something. Can you give us an example of when this would be useful.

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David

[gefjo]

Search this page only

Sorry if I didn't express myself clearly. See this link for clarification:
http://thegef.org/Documents/Council_...f_c27_new.html
It uses Zoom and I only indexed using this url by way of a test.
The users of this page might well wish only to search the documents on this page, not the whole site (which I will ultimately index if all goes well with testing). Even if I index the whole site, I might well want them to have the option only to search the contents of this page.
Clear as mud?
Ctrl-F doesn't really do it (deeply unintuitive for most; they will want a conventional search interface).

[David]

I think I see what you mean. You don't really want to search a single page. You want to search a single page AND all the documents referenced from that page. A subset of your web site in fact.

This can be done in a couple of different ways.
1) You can create multiple sets of index files. For example you could use the set if index files you already created for your test, plus create a new set that covers the entire site. Then have several different search boxes that use different sets of index files. So the search box on your home page covers the entire site. But the search box on your "Working documents" page only covers your working documents.

2) You can have one large set of index files and use the Zoom categories feature to allow searching in subsections of your site. See the users guide for details. http://www.wrensoft.com/zoom/usersguide.html

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David

[gefjo]

Search this page only

Thanks for your suggestions; I'll try them out.
I am interested to see how performance is (indexing and search) on our site with several thousand pdfs. So far, so good. A nice product.

[David]

It should be OK. We have done benchmark testing with the CGI option to about 180,000 pages and still get sub 2 second searches. See,

http://www.wrensoft.com/zoom/benchmarks.html

Just make sure the PC you are using for indexing has sufficient RAM in it.

---
David

[JW]

A script to simulate the Ctrl-F function is something that I have literally searched for for months. There is almost nothing out there. Some of our technical resources have long tables of information on a single page, and a Find In Page feature would make it tremendously easier for the users to find what they are looking for.

I've only found 2 instances thus far on the web:
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http://www.dynamicdrive.com/dynamicindex11/findpage.htm

This script has code to handle any type of browser, and supposedly is able to handle frames as well. (A small frame would be really nice, because otherwise a search result can cause the page to jump away from the search form.) I haven't had much success getting it to work in frames mode yet, but I'm still working on it. If nothing else, it definitely works without frames. Please note that I haven't yet implemented the "Jump To Higlighting" feature in Zoom, so I don't know if this code would conflict with it or not... but I can easily see how it would.
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http://www.episcopalchurch.org/sitemap.htm

The Episcopal Church's site map also has a nifty search-in-page feature for their sitemap. However, unlike the first source, this one appears to have been custom-built by them. I would definitely ask their webmaster for permission before using their code somewhere else. (Stealing from churches is considered bad form )

You can request permission by sending a message to comments@episcopalchurch.org
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If Wrensoft feels that searching within a page is not a useful feature... well, I guess I can respect that opinion, even if I don't necessarily agree. But for other people in a situation similar to mine, I hope that the above resources come in handy.

- JW

[Ray]

I believe you may have misunderstood the original post and David's response. From what we can gather, "gefjo" actually wanted to restrict searching to the PDF documents linked on that page - not restrict searching to just the text on that single page.

The users of this page might well wish only to search the documents on this page, not the whole site (which I will ultimately index if all goes well with testing).

The resources you provided are basically Ctrl-F replacements, implemented in Javascript. They definitely do have its uses - mostly cosmetic (it really is just a duplication of the Ctrl-F feature already implemented in the browser), but it's not really what Zoom seeks out to do.

In the context of Zoom (which returns a list of web pages as results), a "search single page only" feature would simply list one page if that word was found on the page, or not list the page at all. I think you'd agree that this would not be very useful.

Locating the individual occurances of words within a page is a very different feature, and involves scrolling the browser window to the correct line, highlighting, etc.

We do have an optional feature which extends Zoom's abilities to highlight and scroll to the occurances of words within the actual page, which is described in detail here:
http://www.wrensoft.com/zoom/support/highlighting.html