Exact phrase problem

[Richard-South]

I'm providing a mirror of a site on DVD. The client specifically wants the " " exact match option. But I can't activate it on the javascript option. Is there -any- way to provide an exact match search ? It's a dealbreaker

[David]

Yes, in fact there are multiple options. But not with JavaScript.

You can find the technical options for searching DVD's here.

[Richard-South]

Thanks for the quick reply.

Unfortunately there doesn't seem to be any solution that:

- Is cross-platform
- Has exact phrase search
- Doesn't require purchasing another product

[David]

Don't know if it helps but I think the Server2Go people have beta Mac release, it is donationware. Not really our recommended solution unless you can't afford to purchase any software.

[Richard-South]

Well, I'm extremely happy with my purchase of Zoom. Just a shame about the exact phrase Java option. Pity it isn't selectable and the user could decide whether to live with the speed...

thanks again

[David]

Java and Javascript are different things. We only offer Javascript, which runs in a browser.

Years ago exact phrase with Javascript really wasn't an option. The browsers were very slow, had very small RAM limits, and download speeds were slow (with Javascript the entire index needs to download from the server to the browser before any search can be done).

And an index with exact phrase support is much larger than one without.

However in the last couple of years Javascript performance has been a big point of competition between browser developers. And Javascript performance has probably got 10 fold better in the last few years. While more people are on broadband links, their expectations have also increased. Most people aren't going to be prepared to wait 10 - 60secs for a search to start. Even loading and parsing a small index from DVD in Javascript might take 5 or 6 seconds.

Given that it would be useful to only a small number of people, and there are other better technical options in most cases, we decided that it wasn't worth the development effort.