Just purchased Professional; a few questions

[jerrykatz]

I have used PicoSearch for years with no problems. I've purchased Zoom Professional. Here are some questions:

If you are familiar with Pico Search, is it realistic to assume that Zoom could perform as well (or better)?

Why are most of my files being skipped during indexing? There are links on each page linking to pages throughout the site. PicoSearch has no problem finding all my pages.

How do I write a skip option that tells Zoom not to index a chunk of text? (The same body of text appears on each of the 4000+ pages of my site, nonduality.com.)

During indexing, Zoom tells me that some pages are being indexed (okay, I get that) and some are being downloaded (I don't get that; downloaded where? And why?)

If I can resolve these questions, I'll take this learning process to the next step, and probably have some more questions! Thank you.

Jerry

[David]

is it realistic to assume that Zoom could perform as well (or better)

While I don't have extensive experience with Pico, you should be able to get results at least as good, and have a lot more control at a much cheaper price. Of course there will be some differences in the way they work however.

Why are most of my files being skipped during indexing?

Check the log, it gives a reason for each skipped file. See also this FAQ,
Q. Why are some of my pages being skipped by the indexer?

How do I write a skip option that tells Zoom not to index a chunk of text?

See this FAQ,
Q. How do I prevent parts of my webpage from being indexed (eg. exclude navigation menus, or page footers)?

...and some are being downloaded (I don't get that; downloaded where? And why?)

If you are using the spider mode option then the files need to downloaded from the remote server to the local machine (the one running Zoom) before they can be indexed.

[David]

I've just had a look at your site.

I can see several reason why some pages might skipped.

Some of your HTML pages are very long. For example your home page is a huge 301KB, excluding images.

So you might need to increase the file size limit in the limits configuration window, to be at least as large as your largest page.

You also have a huge number of links to external sites. By default all these outgoing links are not followed. While I assume this is what you want, it does increment the skipped file counter.

Images are also skipped by default. So each image file encountered is by default skipped (unless you change the configuration), and this increments the skip count as well.

You also seem to have several domains on your site. I found links to
www.non-dualitypress.com which is a different domain from nonduality.com and so it is skipped by default (again this can be changed in the configuration if required).

It is the same situation with this domain, www.non-dualitybooks.com

Hope this helps.

[jerrykatz]

Thank you. I was able to get all my pages indexed.

I ftp'd them to my website host in a file I created called nonduality.com/html/search. I watched as the entire uploading process took place.

The search box appears on my site, nonduality.com, however when I try to search, I get an error-404 message.

I opened the nonduality.com/html/search file and nothing was there. I searched other files and could not find where they were uploaded to.

Please suggest a next step. Thank you.

Jerry

[David]

I think you have got yourself confused about the location of the files you uploaded.

I poked around your site and found the files you uploaded here,
http://www.nonduality.com/search/search.php

The search function seems to work fine.

Next steps you might want to look at are,
1) Adding search boxes on other pages on your site,
Q. How do I add search boxes to my web pages?

2) Customising the search results to match your site (fonts, colours, etc..)
Q. How do I customize the appearance of my search results with CSS?

[jerrykatz]

Thank you. I got it going:

http://nonduality.com

For now, just one more question. I use regular html, not css. Do you know where I'd put the code to change the font? Thanks again.

[David]

The HTML <font> tag has been deprecated and should no longer be used. Deprecated tag will eventually be removed from the HTML standard.

Instead you should use CSS. For example to change the font of the search results add this line of code in the CSS section of the search_template.html file.
.results { font-family: Verdana; font-size:100% }

See also this FAQ for more details.
Q. How do I customize the appearance of my search results with CSS?

[Ray]

It looks like you have accidentally removed the <style> section of the original search_template.html file provided.

So, just to clarify, all you need to do is add a section like the following in your "search_template.html" file, between the <head> ... </head> section of the page.

[B]<style type="text/css">[/B]
  .highlight { background: #FFFF40; }
  .searchheading { font-size: 130%; font-weight: bold; }
  .summary { font-size: 80%; font-style: italic; }
  .suggestion { font-size: 100%; }
  .results { font-size: 100%; font-family: Verdana; }
  .category { color: #999999; }
  .sorting { text-align: right; }
  .result_block { margin-top: 15px; margin-bottom: 15px; clear: left; }
  .result_altblock { margin-top: 15px; margin-bottom: 15px; clear: left; }
[B]</style>[/B]

And you can put an assortment of styles within the <style>...</style> tags, as explained in the FAQ (linked above) to control any fonts/colors/layout of various elements on the search page.

Hope that helps.

[jerrykatz]

Thanks, Ray. I have it how I want it for now:

http://nonduality.com/search/search.php?zoom_query=dogs

Jerry