Customising Search Results Page

[pieman1981]

Hi,
I am currently in the process of developing a new search for http://www.ogbit.com.

To give abit of background about the site..it is a business to business directory that has some customers that pay for listings. These paid for listing include a company logo on the search results.

As you can currently see on the site, when you search for a term eg. shipping containers, the paid for companies have their logo displayed on the search results page.


Using Zoom, I am currently using:

<meta name="ZOOMTITLE" content="<%= adoRs("CompanyName") %>" />
<meta name="ZOOMDESCRIPTION" content="<%= adoRs("SummaryProfile") %>" />
<meta name="ZOOMIMAGE" content="http://www.ogbit.com/images/company/<%= strCompanyID %>/lgoLogo.gif" />

which is pulling in dynamic content from the database for each results.

My question is...is this the best way to produce custom titles / descriptions and images. Also, if the company is not a paid for company, there wont be an image at the location specified so therefore ruining the layout of the search results page.

Also, it there a was of changing the HTML of the search results page. I would ideally like to add a "View more info from Company Name" link after each result..how would I go about doing this?

Thanks in advance

[Ray]

My question is...is this the best way to produce custom titles / descriptions and images. Also, if the company is not a paid for company, there wont be an image at the location specified so therefore ruining the layout of the search results page.

It's not clear how your want the layout to differ for the non-paid listings. On your current site, there is no margin/indenting for these links, which is the same as what would happen if Zoom was not given a thumbnail/icon URL for a result.

If you did want the results without images to be indented the same way, you could potentially do this with CSS, or simply specify an image for them anyway, but use a placeholder blank image (or a generic non-logo image).

Also, it there a was of changing the HTML of the search results page. I would ideally like to add a "View more info from Company Name" link after each result..how would I go about doing this?

There's alot of things you can customize (see Advance Template Options in the Users Guide) but changing the format of each individual search result (and to have two clickable links) require some deeper modifications (and it is a rather more obscure requirement).

If you are using, say, the ASP script, you could modify the search script code to do this, but (1) you would need to be familiar with scripting and (2) we are unable to support any modifications made to the script code. Also (3) there are maintenance issues with new releases or builds and you would need to port your changes over each time.

Alternatively, you could use the CGI/XML output and parse the XML results to post-process the search results data and render your own presentation format as required.

[pieman1981]

Hi Ray,

Thanks very much for the reply...I have worked out the image issue, but still unclear on the adding a link at the bottom of each result item.

To make it clear, I would want this link to go to the customers external website, not the page on my site. Is the only way of doing this by editing the search.asp script?

Regards

[pieman1981]

Hi,

Just to update, this is a testing area of the site and have managed to get the website address using a custom meta field. The only problem now being I cant see how to make it a link...I have achieved it changing the search.asp script but every thing the site is re-indexed it looses the changes.

http://www.ogbit.com/dynamic/search/search_results.asp?zoom_query=office&category=all& submit=Search+OgBit.com

thanks for any help

[Ray]

If you are modifying the search script, you can do so via "Templates"->"Edit search script source". This will change the source code that is used to generate the index output, so you will not lose your changes after every re-index.

Alternatively (and a better solution), you can make a copy of your customized search script (placing it in a folder somewhere), and specify Zoom to use this via "Configure"->"Advanced"->"Custom script source path". This way you don't need to modify the original source, and your customized script will only apply to this particular configuration (and not apply to other sites you may index in the future).

[pieman1981]

Thanks very much for the help...
one last question..if i decided to use .cgi instead of asp, is it still possible to edit the script in the same way...
Currently cgi is not working on our servers, hence why I am using asp at the moment

Regards

[David]

The CGI is coded in C++ and compiled (which dramatically improve performance over ASP). But becuase it is compiled it isn't as easy to modify.

We sell the C++ source code as part of the SDK.

If you have anying a problem getting the CGI to run, check that your host supports CGI and refer to this FAQ page.