Suggestion: Log The Search Origination Page

[Queue]

Rayski, another suggestion from an Extremely Satisfied User...

I have Zoom Search methods/forms all over my website. There are many different Zoom search forms on many different pages. When a user performs a search I would like to know which page the user executed the search from. So...how about adding the page from which the search originated to the /logs/seachwords.log file.

Example:

2009-04-30, 19:28:59, 96.56.106.99, "test", Matches = 4, OR, PerPage = 100, PageNum = 0, "Cat = Tips/Guides/FAQ, Website Links", Time = 0.562, Rec = 0, Origin: MyPageName.asp

[David]

It is not typical to have multiple installations of Zoom logging to the same log file. More typically is to have 1 log file per installation of Zoom.

Or are you talking about the page that the user looked at before they hit the seach function, the referring page?

In either case you could also get a lot if useful from your server logs as well.

For example, here are two entries from our web server's log.
59.167.255.193 - - [06/May/2009:04:23:11 -0400] "GET /search.php?zoom_query=asp.net HTTP/1.1" 200 17874 "http://www.wrensoft.com/" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 6.0; WOW64; SLCC1; .NET CLR 2.0.50727; .NET CLR 3.5.21022; InfoPath.2; .NET CLR 3.5.30729; .NET CLR 3.0.3061"

194.176.105.42 - - [06/May/2009:04:44:59 -0400] "GET /search.php?zoom_query=dictword&x=0&y=0 HTTP/1.1" 200 9549 "http://www.wrensoft.com/zoom/support/faq_CD_search.html" "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-GB; rv:1.9.0.10) Gecko/2009042316 Firefox/3.0.10"


In the first case the user executed the search ffrom our home page. In the 2nd case they executed it from the a FAQ page.

[Queue]

Or are you talking about the page that the user looked at before they hit the seach function, the referring page?...

Yes, I am talking about the the page that the user looked at before they hit the seach function: the referring page.

For example, I have Zoom Search embedded in these pages...

• http://www.avatar-moving.com/forum/forum_topics.asp?FID=3&PN=1
• http://www.avatar-moving.com/gh_newstoc.asp
• http://www.avatar-moving.com/site-search.asp
• http://www.avatar-moving.com/gl_directory.asp?sec=3

Looking through server logs is onerous. IMHO, much easier to look at /logs/searchwords.log

[David]

Looking through server logs is onerous

Use grep to filters the log and throw the resulting list into Excel. It should only take a couple of minutes.

But if enough people are interested in having it in the Zoom log we can include it. (we don't really want to change the format as it risks breaking open people's scripts).

[Queue]

Thanks for this idea...much appreciated Ray.