Indexing sites with different domains

[indianabenny]

I'm trying to index two sites, a main website and a support site so they are both searchable from the main website. Unfortunately, the support site is running under a completely different domain (i.e. not a sub-domain).

The main website domain is: https://www.treeage.com
The support domain is: https://treeage.zendesk.com/forums

I've set the Advanced spider URL options to scan both domains. It will index both domains (I can see it in the log files that it is) but searching returns only the first domain's results. I tried adding both items to the base URL settings by adding a semi-colon as specified in the user guide (http://www.wrensoft.com/ftp/zoom.pdf) with the same results.

Any help would be greatly appreciated. I am using the mac version of Zoom Search Engine v7.

Additionally, if I attempt to add a secure domain (https://) while under the Advanced spider URL options, it tells me that I need to enter a valid domain. Removing the 's' (http://) then allows me to save the configuration. I've been getting around this by editing the config file in a text editor but it's kind of a pain.

[Ray]

If both domains are successfully indexed, then you should see search results from both domains. What you should check is that you are correctly uploading your latest index files to your web server. Make sure you are actually searching on the index files you most recently created (since adding the second domain and indexing it) and that you are not searching on an older set of index files. This is a common mistake.

You should not need to alter the base URL for this scenario.

If you still have trouble, give us the URL to the search page and we can take a look. Also tell us which query words you are searching for that should yield results from the second domain. If possible, ZIP up the index files and your .zcfg configuration file, and we can take an even closer look to make sure that the second domain is actually indexed properly.

For example, while it's possible that pages from your domain was "indexed" but it may had been plagued by authentication/redirect issues and the content you expected to be indexed, was actually never available to the spider.

The inability to enter https:// URLs in the Advanced Spider URL window is a bug, and we'll have this fixed for the next release. Thanks for bringing it to our attention.

[indianabenny]

Thank you for the reply Ray. I was using a customized settings file which seemed to have caused the problem. I was deleting the files off of the server and manually uploading them so I knew I had the right search results. Appears it was just a setting in my custom settings.php file. I was able to get that sorted out. Appreciate your feedback and help.

[Ray]

We don't recommend modifying the "settings.php" file. This is why there is that big warning at the top of it. You are basically risking (and very likely breaking) functionality by doing so, because every re-index is likely to have different data in that file.

Pretty much everything that can be changed in settings.php can be done properly via the Indexer. So let us know what it is that you are changing in the file (or what you are hoping to achieve), and we can advise you on the proper way to do it.

[indianabenny]

I didn't really need anything custom in the settings.php file, rather I needed to change something in the search.php file to target the correct URL for paging parameters as the search is incorporated into a WordPress website (wish I would have found your plugin before today). I've been settings up sites this way with Zoom for a number of years but for some reason I duplicated the settings.php file in addition to the search.php file and that caused the problem. Thanks for the assist.