Multiple context entries per link

[BillCribbs]

I am using Zoomsearch 6.0 Professional Edition for my website. Due to the nature of my content, I need to have multiple contextual samples from each search term on a given page. Here's an example:

With Picosearch, the results look like this for the search terms "James Clark":

2. Kansas Obituary and Death Notice Archive - Page 370
... CHANUTE - James Efton Ketcherside, 85, of Chanute, ...
... at Moore, Ark., to James Hilmon and Fanny (Farmer) ...
... Two sons, Gene and James Ketcherside, preceded him in ...
... Donald Clark PONCA CITY - Donald LeRoy Clark, ...
... - Donald LeRoy Clark, 61, of Ponca City, died Dec. 30, ...
... , Irving, TX 75062. Clark was born Dec. 1, 1938, in ...
... Ella (Stevenson) Clark. He was raised in Arkansas City ...

With Zoomsearch, the same search looks like this:

Kansas Obituary and Death Notice Archive - Page 370
... Severy; and his grandparents, Butch and Wanda Dilli, Howard. Efton Ketcherside CHANUTE- James Efton Ketcherside, 85, of Chanute, died Jan. 2, 2000, at Park ... brother, John McClure, Cassville, Mo.; 13 grandchildren and 15 great-grandchildren. Donald Clark PONCA CITY- Donald LeRoy Clark, 61, of Ponca City, died Dec. 30 ...
Terms matched: 2 - Score: 103


I would like to have all instances of the search terms on a given page to be displayed in multiple contextual phrases like in the Picosearch example. Is this possible?

Bill

[Ray]

Zoom is limited to only showing 3 contextual extractions per result. This is similar to Google, and in most cases, showing too many context descriptions (certainly ALL matches) would be overwhelming for most users (the idea of the search result being a brief bit of data to determine which page is most relevant, as opposed to seeing all hits within that page).

This of course, can depend on the nature of your website. In your case, a page with a large lists of names can be difficult either way. Does Picosearch show all hits, or just 7? In which case, if it doesn't appear in that 7, the user would still be none the wiser? And if it shows all hits... then that could be a very long list of search results to sift through.

What would be more effective, in this scenario, is:
1) Enable exact phrase matching and use quotation marks around the search query, so that we only match "James Clark" and not "James ... blah blah ... Clark"
2) Enable jump to highlighting: http://www.wrensoft.com/zoom/support/highlighting.html

[cribbswh]

Zoomsearch multiple results

Thanks, Ray, for your reply. To answer your question, Picosearch (which is going away according to their recent announcement) will list as many search results per page as you configure. The reason why this configuration is important to my users is because they are looking for records for that name combination. I haven't indexed my marriage records site yet but am about to. These records can have as many as 30 or more for a given surname. I would like to display at least 10 if possible, each on a different line like this:

...SMITH, John 30 3/24/2001...
...SMITH, Joseph 26 5/23/2001...
...SMITH, Joseph 21 6/20/2001...
...SMITH, Joshua 32 12/2/2001...
...SMITH, Joshua 30 5/25/2001...

I was just wondering if there was any configuration that I can make to the program that will give results like this. If not, I will work with it however it displays. I will be using Zoomsearch exclusively at Genlookups.com
Regards,
Bill Cribbs

Zoom is limited to only showing 3 contextual extractions per result. This is similar to Google, and in most cases, showing too many context descriptions (certainly ALL matches) would be overwhelming for most users (the idea of the search result being a brief bit of data to determine which page is most relevant, as opposed to seeing all hits within that page).

This of course, can depend on the nature of your website. In your case, a page with a large lists of names can be difficult either way. Does Picosearch show all hits, or just 7? In which case, if it doesn't appear in that 7, the user would still be none the wiser? And if it shows all hits... then that could be a very long list of search results to sift through.

What would be more effective, in this scenario, is:
1) Enable exact phrase matching and use quotation marks around the search query, so that we only match "James Clark" and not "James ... blah blah ... Clark"
2) Enable jump to highlighting: http://www.wrensoft.com/zoom/support/highlighting.html

[Ray]

The limit to 3 context extraction is a built-in limitation. We can't change this without a major change to the index format.

[GaryO]

I have just purchased the standard edition. Have not yet found how to get 3 context results per page showing (I would like at least that).

Have migrated from Picosearch, and may have to do same from Atomz - I have had 3 websites producing multiple contexts per page - williams.gen.nz is an example with Picosearch (free version) until they stop it. Typing 'williams' into search field will give as many as of 13 or 14 results per url indexed. My 3 sites are reliant on multiple search results per url indexed. So the first search results page if set at 10 urls listed, could have up to 50 and more more incidences of the search phrase (or word) with relevant text on either side of each.

So it is important that visitors spend a minute on the search result page, rather than to lose their interest by expecting them to wade through pages of stuff looking for the correct phrase (or word) that they do not know where it is and if it is pertinent to their needs or not. This dilemma may be facing hundreds or even thousands who are being forced to migrate from places like Picosearch.

Interesting days
Hope you can help a bit.
Thanks, Gary.

[David]

I think you are confused as to the Picosearch behaviour. On your site it is only returning 4 text snippets for a single word search. Even if the word occurs 100s of times on the page.

Nevertheless, this is a feature that has been asked for a few times of the years.
The problem with it is that there is no efficient way to implement it. Either the size of the index needs to grow substantially or if the index structure it kept the same the search time will be much slower. Larger more complex indexes also mean slower indexing, more complex incremental indexing and again slower searches.

However we recognise that in many cases having the flexible functionality is important, even if it means the user needs to wait longer for the results and we burn a bunch of CPU and disk resources to get the results.

So once we have completed the V7 release that we are working on at the moment, we'll go back have a more detailed look at what is involved and what the performance penalty is in real life, with a view to implementing some type of solution.