Recs for tagging content for meta data search

[aschecht]

I need advice about the best way to harness the power of Zoom Search to achieve my objective:

I have a site of 1000 pages. Each of these pages belong to a category assigned based on their folder. 200 of the pages scattered throughout the site (no common folder/path) and with no common filename are special (we'll call them "premium" pages for this example). I want to be able to search for just the premium pages using a simple search box with a radio button underneath that says "All" and "Premium" with a default of "All".

I thought about adding a Zoomcategory meta tag to each of the premium pages but the user guide said that the Zoomcategory tag would replace the categories assigned by folder/filename. I need to keep the categories based on folder. So perhaps the Zoomcategory meta tag won't work for me.

Then I looked at use custom meta data. I could put a custom meta data tag on each Premium page. Would there be a way to set up a search form with a radio button as I described that would search for All pages or only those with the Premium meta data tag (ie. looks at whether premium meta data tag is present or absent).

To complicate things, there are three types of premium pages: silver, gold, and platinum. If I assigned the respective premium pages custom meta data tags "premiumsilver", "premiumgold", and "premiumplatinum" could I then use a wildcard with the meta data to search for either any premium page (ie. premium*) or a specific class of premium page (premiumsilver)?

What would be the best way to tag this data so I could search for it as described - either All pages, Premium pages, or a specific subgroup of the Premium pages?

Can a radio button be used to assign meta data value in the search form?

Thanks in advance,

Andrew

[David]

I don't really see the problem with categories. For the files that can be categorised via their folder or file name, do this. For the files that are in non specific folders use the Zoomcategory meta tag to force their category (or categories).

[aschecht]

The documentation suggests that if I used the Zoomcategory meta tag to assign a category I'd also need to re-assign the category that had previously been assigned by folder/filename. It would be nice if one could retain the categories assigned by folder/filename and have those assigned by Zoomcategory tag added as additional categories.

I think the search form with a radio button for All or Premium would be easy if I used categories.

Thanks,

Andrew

[David]

You can specify multiple ZOOMCATEGORY tags within the same file if you wish to have the page belonging to more than one category. For example:
<meta name="ZOOMCATEGORY" content="News">
<meta name="ZOOMCATEGORY" content="Old website archive">

So you can just set the folder category via the tags along with your new category.

[aschecht]

Thanks.

Andrew