Phrases in Recommended Links and Synonyms

[vbuis]

Hi, I've just spent the better part of two weeks configuring and testing a site using Zoom, and continue to be impressed with its functions and performance. By the way, I think you should raise the price--it's worth more than $299.

A recurring problem I have involves phrases, both in recommended links and synonyms. In building recommended links for single-word or hyphenated terms, the search produces great results, even when users enter crazy searches such as <i>things to know about facebook</i>. I have a recommended link for facebook* and face-book*. However, when they enter the same search with Face book spelled as two words, they get no recommended links, and since I can't create a multi-word synonym, they will probably get no hits at all. It appears that wildcards only work in recommended links for single-word terms, or am I missing something?

On our site, this is a widespread problem, which greatly diminishes the usefulness of Zoom.

Our search is here: http://nlc.nebraska.gov/search/nlc/search.cgi

I have a few other issues and suggestions I'd like to share, but I'll put them in separate posts to keep the thread focused.

[Ray]

Thanks for the comments and positive feedback too.

The URL isn't working from here at time of testing (server is temporarily down?). But have you tried creating another recommended link, for the two word phrase?

While synonyms do not support multiple words, the recommended links feature does. And you can have one recommended link for "facebook" and another (with the same URL) for "face book".

[vbuis]

Wildcards in recommended links with phrases&gt;

Thanks for the comments and positive feedback too.

The URL isn't working from here at time of testing (server is temporarily down?). But have you tried creating another recommended link, for the two word phrase?

While synonyms do not support multiple words, the recommended links feature does. And you can have one recommended link for "facebook" and another (with the same URL) for "face book".

Thanks, Ray.

I have created separate recommended links using the two-word term "face book," but this only returns recommended links if the searcher enters that exact phrase and nothing more. Users will typically add extraneous words "information about face book," which renders the RL useless. For single-word RLs, such as facebook, I can use a wildcard (facebook*) in the RL and this then matches any phrase they try, no matter how many extraneous words. However, when I try the wildcard approach with multiple words, e.g. face book*, it doesn't work at all. Am I missing something? It would be a MAJOR help if I could use wildcards in multi-word RLs. Currently, I must anticipate every possible combination of words a searcher might enter (impossible, really) in order for the RL feature to work with multi-word terms. Facebook, by the way, is just a trivial example. We have thousands of multi-word terms in our vocabulary that suffer from the same problem. Thanks for any help.

[Ray]

We will consider making the recommended links behave differently in V7. So that a recommended link for "Face book" will match "information about face book".