ZoomSearch with Ajax

[kenneth]

Hi all,

First af all, let me introduce myself, I am Kenneth, an IT consultant and student in Manchester, UK.
Idk if I can put a link to my blog (I'm currently writing an article about custom search engines, and ZoomSearch is definitely on the list!), if I can, here it is : www.myittips.com

I've been thinking of implementing ZoomSearch on the intranet my colleagues and I use, but most of it is constructed in AJAX. Will ZoomSearch work anyway?

Thx in advance.

[Ray]

The answer is, ultimately, it depends.

You can certainly create a web site using AJAX which is still spider friendly. This is what every web developer should aim for, because a web site which is NOT spider friendly will suffer in terms of presence (SEO and ranking on external search engines) as well as accessibility.

A site which is spider friendly can be crawled by any capable search engine or data bot, including Zoom.

Being spider friendly means that your site does not depend on JavaScript, and that it can be crawled programmatically without human interaction. This does not mean you have to give up on AJAX -- you can have an AJAX interface for humans, and a <noscript> interface for bots.

In addition to this, Zoom supports Offline Mode which does not crawl any pages. However, you site would have to have data in the form of static files on your hard drive. You can rewrite URLs to suit if necessary.

But as I said, there's alot of ways to build a site, and there's a lot of ways Zoom can index your website. So it's hard to comment vaguely.

We ultimately recommend downloading the Free Edition of Zoom, reading the Users Guide, and trying it. If you have any trouble, check the Support section and FAQ, and post on this forum and we can help.