A couple of general questions

[David]

Is the search page public, we can take a look at it?

[phil@infomed.org]

Thanks David,

We will look into adding the ZOOMPAGEBOOST attributes w/ the weighted values to our pages.

I will also try the "provide suggestions" option, I had not noticed that before. I am not sure using the 'synonyms' is really feasible (or even ) in our case as our content is in German and medical, so there could be a ton of misspellings. It seems like a big project to keep a misspelling inventory for medical terms.

The auto-complete files are uploaded to our web server and I've added the references to the search page:

<!-- zoom auto complete -->
<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="https://www.infomed.ch/zoom/zoom_autocomplete.css">
<script type="text/javascript" src="https://www.infomed.ch/zoom/zoom_autocomplete.js"></script>

But for some reason no auto-complete happens in the browser. I wonder if it is because we adjusted the search form to match our look and feel.

Best
ph

[David]

Is it necessary to migrate to v8

If you don't need the new features, technical support, compatibility with latest PHP releases, potential security fixes and other bug fixes, etc... then you can continue with V7.
Don't fix what isn't broken.

weigh content higher/lower based on a date

No, at least not automatically.
You can sort by date however.
You could also script your pages to boost the new pages with
<meta name="ZOOMPAGEBOOST" content="5">
and old pages with
<meta name="ZOOMPAGEBOOST" content="-5">

any way Zoom can handle typoes and misspellings

Yes, there is an option to provide spelling suggestions. It is a check box on the "Search page" window.
It isn't prefect however. So you might want to combine it with Synonyms.
One limitation is that it will only ever suggest words that are in your index and works best on English language. (it doesn't have a built in English, German, Japanese, etc... dictionary)

You can also manually add common mis-spellings to the index like this
<meta name="ZOOMWORDS" content="melody, mellody, melodie, tune, song">

Does the front end in the browser need any special triggers

Once this is enabled, the next indexing run will create an additional .zdat file ("zoom_autocomplete.zdat") and include a "zoom_autocomplete.js" file and "zoom_autocomplete.css" file. The latter two files can also be retrieved from the "Extras" folder manually (via "Tools" menu -> "Open extras folder"). These files need to be referenced from your search page.
These files must all be uploaded to your server along with your other index files (Zoom will do this automatically if you use the built-in FTP feature).

[phil@infomed.org]

Hi there,

I have a couple of general questions. We have had zoom running on infomed.ch for years and are quite happy with it but we would like to make a couple of small adjustments.

- We still seem to be using v7 of Zoom. Is it necessary to migrate to v8 or can we continue using v7 for the time being?
(I think we tried to switch once before but found it was easier to remain on v7)

- Question re. Weighting; Is there any way to weigh content higher/lower based on a date? We have content that is quite old that should definitely be lower in the SERPs than the newer content. Is the default weighting in the SERPs always 'relevance'?
(should we try to exclude older content from being indexed if we feel it has too much prominence?)

- Is there any way Zoom can handle typoes and misspellings (and alternate spellings), and suggest correct spelling?
I see there is a Synonyms tab in the configuration options but it seems that wouldn't be the right place for misspellings. Let alone trying to anticipate and list misspellings.

- Finally, we have auto-complete enabled in the configuration, but I don't remember it ever working. Does the front end in the browser need any special triggers for this to work?

Thanks very much
Philipp Gysling