Zoom Search Engine

USERS GUIDE

Custom website search engine

Version 8.0

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Printed: March 2020

Zoom Search Engine

3Contents

Table of Contents

Foreword 0

Part I Overview

................................................................................................................................... 81 Introduction

................................................................................................................................... 82 What's New

................................................................................................................................... 93 Features

................................................................................................................................... 114 System Requirements

................................................................................................................................... 125 How Zoom works

................................................................................................................................... 136 Installation

................................................................................................................................... 147 What should I do first?

................................................................................................................................... 148 Which search script platform should I use?

................................................................................................................................... 159 What will the end result look like?

................................................................................................................................... 1610 Purchasing Zoom

................................................................................................................................... 1611 Credits

Part II Indexing your website

................................................................................................................................... 191 Using the Zoom Search Engine Indexer

.......................................................................................................................................................... 19Spider mode

.......................................................................................................................................................... 20Offline mode

.......................................................................................................................................................... 21Start spider URL (spider mode only)

.......................................................................................................................................................... 24Start directory (offline mode only)

.......................................................................................................................................................... 24Base URL

.......................................................................................................................................................... 24Output directory

.......................................................................................................................................................... 25Platform

.......................................................................................................................................................... 25Start indexing

.......................................................................................................................................................... 25Stop indexing

.......................................................................................................................................................... 25Indexing status

.......................................................................................................................................................... 27Log

................................................................................................................................... 282 Configuring Zoom further

.......................................................................................................................................................... 29Scan options

.......................................................................................................................................................... 31Skip options

.......................................................................................................................................................... 33Thread options

.......................................................................................................................................................... 34Spider options

.......................................................................................................................................................... 37Search page

.......................................................................................................................................................... 41Results layout

.......................................................................................................................................................... 43Indexing options

.......................................................................................................................................................... 45Limits

.......................................................................................................................................................... 47Authentication

.......................................................................................................................................................... 49FTP

.......................................................................................................................................................... 49Autocomplete

.......................................................................................................................................................... 50Languages

.......................................................................................................................................................... 52Weightings

.......................................................................................................................................................... 53Content filtering

.......................................................................................................................................................... 54Categories

Zoom Search Engine4

.......................................................................................................................................................... 54Sitemaps

.......................................................................................................................................................... 56Synonyms

.......................................................................................................................................................... 57Recommended links

.......................................................................................................................................................... 60Index log

.......................................................................................................................................................... 61Advanced

.......................................................................................................................................................... 63Custom Meta Search Fields

................................................................................................................................... 633 Step-by-step Wizard

.......................................................................................................................................................... 64Select file types step

.......................................................................................................................................................... 64Output folder and limit step

................................................................................................................................... 644 FTP

................................................................................................................................... 665 Categories

................................................................................................................................... 706 Custom Meta Search Fields

................................................................................................................................... 747 Date Range Searching

................................................................................................................................... 758 Search Statistics Report

................................................................................................................................... 779 Icons and thumbnails

.......................................................................................................................................................... 79Associating an image with a particular page

.......................................................................................................................................................... 79Associating icon images with a file type

.......................................................................................................................................................... 81Associating thumbnail images with files

................................................................................................................................... 8510 Image indexing

................................................................................................................................... 8711 Incremental indexing

.......................................................................................................................................................... 88Updating an existing index

.......................................................................................................................................................... 88Add start points to existing index

.......................................................................................................................................................... 88Add list of new or updated pages

.......................................................................................................................................................... 89View or delete pages from existing index

................................................................................................................................... 9012 XML/RSS output (CGI only)

................................................................................................................................... 9213 Broken link detection

................................................................................................................................... 9214 Configuration (ZCFG) files

................................................................................................................................... 9315 Command line parameters

................................................................................................................................... 9416 Scheduling and automatic indexing

................................................................................................................................... 9617 Using the 64-bit Indexer

................................................................................................................................... 9718 Plugins (Indexing PDF, DOC and other document formats)

.......................................................................................................................................................... 98File formats supported

.......................................................................................................................................................... 98Unsupported binary formats

.......................................................................................................................................................... 99Installing a plugin

.......................................................................................................................................................... 99Using the plugins

.......................................................................................................................................................... 99Configuring a plugin

.......................................................................................................................................................... 100Upgrading a plugin

.......................................................................................................................................................... 100Using custom description (.desc) files

.......................................................................................................................................................... 101ZIP file support

Part III Server-side search engine (Using PHP, ASP,

or CGI)

103

................................................................................................................................... 1041 Files required

................................................................................................................................... 1052 Installing the ASP.NET native control

5Contents

Part IV Client-side search engine (Using JavaScript)

109

................................................................................................................................... 1111 Files required

................................................................................................................................... 1112 Limitations of Javascript

................................................................................................................................... 1123 Using the CGI or PHP version without a web server

Part V Publishing your search engine on your

website or CD-ROM

114

................................................................................................................................... 1151 What to do after indexing

................................................................................................................................... 1162 Uploading to your website

................................................................................................................................... 1163 USB distribution

................................................................................................................................... 1164 Additional notes for uploading CGI

................................................................................................................................... 1165 Where is my search page?

Part VI How do I customize the look of my search

page?

118

................................................................................................................................... 1201 Customizing the search form

................................................................................................................................... 1212 Customizing the search results

................................................................................................................................... 1223 Customizing the recommended links

................................................................................................................................... 1224 CSS class listing

................................................................................................................................... 1255 How do I modify the search form on the search page?

................................................................................................................................... 1266 How can I add a search form to my menus, main page, etc.?

................................................................................................................................... 1267 Advanced template options

................................................................................................................................... 1298 More how-to's

................................................................................................................................... 1299 Changing your default editor

Part VII Advanced Options

131

................................................................................................................................... 1321 International / foreign language support

.......................................................................................................................................................... 133Russian (Cyrillic)

.......................................................................................................................................................... 133Japanese

................................................................................................................................... 1332 Translating the search page

................................................................................................................................... 1343 Importing and Exporting additional start URLs

................................................................................................................................... 1354 Editing the search script

................................................................................................................................... 1355 Skipping sections of a page

................................................................................................................................... 1366 Manually add words into the index

................................................................................................................................... 1367 Alternative page titles and descriptions

................................................................................................................................... 1378 Specifying a last-modified date for your web pages

................................................................................................................................... 1379 Enable jump to match and highlight within document

................................................................................................................................... 13810 Search Statistics PHP Script

................................................................................................................................... 14111 Integrating Zoom in your own applications

................................................................................................................................... 14212 The indexing process

Zoom Search Engine6

................................................................................................................................... 14213 Word delimitation when indexing

................................................................................................................................... 14314 Word delimitation when searching

................................................................................................................................... 14315 Other tips

Part VIII Troubleshooting and support

144

................................................................................................................................... 1451 Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

................................................................................................................................... 1452 How to enter in my license key

................................................................................................................................... 1473 Discussion forums

................................................................................................................................... 1474 Known issues

................................................................................................................................... 1485 Technical limitations

................................................................................................................................... 1486 Notes for users upgrading from Zoom 4.x

................................................................................................................................... 1487 Notes for users upgrading from Zoom 3.x

................................................................................................................................... 1498 Contacting us

Part IX Appendix

150

................................................................................................................................... 1511 What is PHP, ASP, CGI, or JavaScript?

.......................................................................................................................................................... 151What is PHP?

.......................................................................................................................................................... 151What is ASP (Classic ASP)?

.......................................................................................................................................................... 151What is ASP.NET?

.......................................................................................................................................................... 151What is CGI?

.......................................................................................................................................................... 152What is Javascript?

................................................................................................................................... 1522 Base URL for USB distribution (absolute and relative paths)

................................................................................................................................... 1543 Where is the Program Data directory?

................................................................................................................................... 1544 End User License Agreement (EULA)

Index 158

Overview

Part

Zoom Search Engine8

1 Overview

1.1 Introduction

Zoom Search Engine™ is a package for web developers to easily add a search function to their web site,

CD-ROM, DVD or Intranet. It has the following advantages over other solutions:

· Allows you to create an internal search engine as part of your own website (without depending on any

external web services to produce the results)

· Produces fast search results with a pre-indexed database that is optimized for speed with minimum

overhead.

· Customizable look and feel of your search page, which you have complete control over.

· Easy to use and install

· No advertising

· No scripting knowledge required

· Integrates seamlessly with web pages built using FrontPage and Dreamweaver.

· Runs on practically all web servers and hosting plans because it supports multiple scripting platforms:

PHP, ASP, Javascript or CGI.

· Free Edition is available free of charge with a comprehensive feature set for small and personal

websites.

· Professional, and Enterprise Editions are available for commercial development, and larger websites.

See http://www.zoomsearchengine.com/zoom/ for more information.

1.2 What's New

Version 8 is the most comprehensive version of Zoom yet.

New features introduced in V8 include:

· OCR (Optical Character Recognition): Index and search for text that appear in images (Win10

only)

· Broad numeric matching: Allow for better searching of currency values and part numbers (e.g.

$12,300.99 will match 12300 and 12300.99)

· Multi-threaded Offline Mode indexing: Up to 3x faster offline indexing.

· Performance improvement: Overall indexing speed and memory usage has been optimized, to index

more pages and faster than previous versions.

· New revamped FTP engine featuring SFTP and FTPS (SSL/TLS) support

· http:// and https:// URL insensitive: Better support for sites which switch between HTTP and

HTTPS.

· Many other bug fixes and improvements.

A full list of new features can be found at our What's New web page at http://

www.zoomsearchengine.com/zoom/whatsnew.html.

Overview 9

1.3 Features

The following is a brief list of the basic features provided by Zoom,

· Easy to use and user friendly indexer application which runs from your very desktop (or Windows

based web server) and allows you to configure all elements of the search engine.

· Spider indexing mode allows websites hosted on a web server to be scanned remotely, and

index both

dynamically generated web sites

as well as

static content

. Supports multi-threading for

super fast spider crawling.

· Offline indexing mode available for indexing local web pages, with only static content for speed

and convenience.

· Plugin support* for indexing a variety of file formats (such as DOC, PDF, XLS, PPT, SWF, and lots

more)

· Powerful search syntax allowing for wildcard matches (eg. "zo?m", "*zoom*"), exclusion/

negative searches, exact phrases*, Boolean AND/OR, and more.

· "Google-like" context search results shows the matched word and its surrounding context.

· Highlight words found in search results.

· Sort search results by date or relevance.

· Provide users with spelling suggestions when few results are found.

· You can specify synonyms, variations of words, common misspellings, etc. and allow you to map

them to an equivalent word in the index.

· Weighting and boosting options allow you to increase or decrease the importance of text

(found in headings, or titles, etc.) and particular pages, giving you greater control over which page

gets higher priority in the search results.

· Flexible indexing options allow you to select exactly what you want to index, from title of page,

page content, to Meta author, and filename.

· Customizable search page appearance with HTML and CSS templates.

· Categories option allows you to group files together, and provide a drop-down or checkbox of

categories to restrict your searches to.

· Authentication support for indexing secure websites in spider mode

· Log user searches performed on your website and analyse the statistics with our Search

Statistics Report tool.

· Built-in FTP uploading: Zoom can upload your search files to the web server for you.

· Built-in scheduling: Schedule Zoom to automatically index or generate reports for your site.

· International language support (various charset support, Unicode/UTF-8, accent/diacritic

options, localized search pages, translatable output, and more)

· Advanced HTML document parsing, indexing only the content to your website and avoiding

various scripting code from being mixed up with the text of the document.

· Prevent indexing pages with identical content with CRC signatures.

· Supports cookies and cache used by Windows and Internet Explorer.

· Supports HTML character entities and numeric entities. Eg. &#accute; á

· Configuration files allows you to manage multiple search engines with ease.

*Not available in Free Edition

Advanced features include,

Zoom Search Engine10

· Incremental indexing:

Update or add new pages to your index without needing to perform a full re-index. Available for spider

mode indexing and PHP, ASP and CGI platforms only. See "Incremental indexing" for more information.

· Icons and thumbnails:

This feature allows you to configure images (such as icons and thumbnails) to appear alongside your

search results. Combined with the image indexing option, you can implement image searching

capabilities to your website. Note that Zoom does not generate thumbnails or icon images and you

must specify the appropriate paths and filenames to these files. See the "Icons and thumbnails"

chapter for more information.

· Image indexing (JPG, GIF, PNG, TIFF):

With the use of our new image plugin, you can now index and search image files. Not available in Free

Edition. See "Image indexing" for more information.

· Recommended links:

Add pages and links to appear at the top of your search results when a user searches for certain

keywords. This allows you to specify the best results for certain searches, or gives you the ability to

setup listings for your sponsors if you so desire. See "Recommended links" for more information.

· Content filtering:

Selectively include or exclude pages from being indexed depending on keywords found (or not found) in

the content of the file. See "Content filtering" for more information.

· Broken link detection:

Find broken links (links to mistyped URLs or missing pages returning 404 errors) on your website while

indexing. See "Broken link detection" for more information.

· Sitemap generator (Yahoo™ and Google™ Sitemap compatible):

Generate a sitemap for your site at the same time as your index! This allows you to create sitemap

files to submit to Internet-wide search engines such as Google and Yahoo to help them find all the

pages on your site that their spiders may otherwise be incapable of finding. See "Sitemaps" for more

information.

· Indexing enormous sites:

We have made some significant optimizing which has led to an overhaul of the index structure and

design, consequently allowing us to index and search a much larger amount of data than before.

Memory usage has been reduced by more than half in most cases, and this includes all the new

features and functionalities which we have added! We have also implemented a number of new

techniques which allow us to index much larger sets of data than your physical memory would allow.

This includes the ability to flush and merge index data as it is progressively written to disk. The

indexing capability of the engine now exceeds a million average web pages, and we have introduced

the Enterprise Edition for users who have such enormous search requirements.

· Charset by page:

Zoom will now use the charset specified in the page's meta tag or the HTTP header sent by the server

when indexing files. Previously, the Indexer would always expect content to be delivered in the same

charset specified in the Zoom configuration window (one charset per session). This means that you can

now index various web pages (or websites) which employ different character sets or encoding. The

indexed content will then be converted to the encoding selected in the configuration window, and your

search page will use the same encoding.

· Improved categories:

We have listened to our users feedback and given our category feature an overhaul with some much

requested options. These include: allowing files to belong to multiple categories, being able to search

for multiple categories, wildcard category match patterns, the option to disable the default/catch-all

Overview 11

category, and the use of a ZOOMCATEGORY meta tag to associate a file with a category manually. See

"Categories" for more information.

· XML/RSS (OpenSearch compatible) output:

Option to display search results in OpenSearch compatible XML/RSS output. Allows you to post-process

the search results via your own scripts, or provide RSS feeds for end-users, as well as the myriad of

OpenSearch solutions becoming available online. See "XML/RSS output" for more information.

· Adding meta data to remote files:

You can now override incorrect meta data on remotely hosted sites (which you may not be able to

change, or you do not wish to host .desc files on) by allowing Zoom to look for their corresponding

.desc files in a local folder when spidering a remote website. See "Scan options" for more information.

· Highlighting words in PDF files:

You can enable this option to allow searched words to be highlighted within PDF documents when they

are opened in Acrobat Reader 7.0 or later. See "Configuring a plugin" for more information.

· Limit pages per start point:

You can now restrict the number of pages to be indexed from a specific start point (and have different

limits per start point). See "Start spider URL" for more information.

· MP3 audio/music file indexing:

New plugin for indexing and searching meta data within MP3 files such as Title, Artist, Album, Duration

and more.

· AutoCAD file indexing (DWF)

· Indexing filenames of recognized binary files (EXE, WMV, ... etc.)

· And many more!

1.4 System Requirements

For indexing your site (using Zoom Indexer)

The Zoom Indexer can run on any computer with the following specifications:

Windows Version

· Windows 7, Windows 8, Windows 10, or Server 2012, Server 2016.

· 128 megabytes of memory (RAM)

· At least 50 megabytes of free disk space

· For very large web sites containing tens of thousands of pages, more RAM (and disk space) is

required.

· For spider mode indexing, you will require an established connection to the Internet.

There are also versions of the Zoom Indexer available that can run on Linux and Mac OSX.

For searching your site

Zoom Search Engine12

To perform the online search queries made by visitors on your website, you will require one of the

following:

A. A web server running PHP 5 or higher. PHP is a server side scripting language supported

by most UNIX / Linux based servers. For those unfamiliar with server side scripting, PHP is

commonly installed on web servers so you might have access to it and not even know about it.

Please consult your web host administrator. For more information about PHP, please refer to

http://www.php.net/

B. A web server running ASP 3.0 or higher. Microsoft’s server side scripting platform with

VBScript 5.5 and MDAC 2.8 or above. This requirement is supported by default in most Microsoft

IIS installations.

C. A web server with permissions to execute CGI. CGI (Common Gateway Interface) is an

alternative to PHP and ASP for server-side processing. You will require CGI executing

permissions on your web server (check with your web host). Our CGI solution provides the best

support for very large sites. You will also need to check that your web server runs on one of the

following operating systems: Windows, Linux or BSD.

D. If the above solutions do not cater to your requirements (eg. You want to run searches on a CD

without a web server) or your web host simply do not provide these options, then you should

use the Javascript version, in which case the only requirement is that your visitors must have

Javascript enabled browsers.

Confused?

If you are not familiar with some of the above terminology, refer to the appendix

chapter

What is PHP , ASP , CGI or Javascript ?

1.5 How Zoom works

Below is an illustrated representation of how Zoom works.

As you can see, there are two main components to Zoom: the Zoom Indexer and the Zoom Search

Script.

Overview 13

1.6 Installation

Zoom Search Engine14

1.7 What should I do first?

The following can serve as a guide for first-time users, or if you are not sure what you should do first.

1. Install the Zoom Search Engine package on your computer. (see Installation)

2. Determine which search script platform you should use. (see

Which search script platform should I

use?

)

3. Index your website with the Zoom Search Engine Indexer application. (see

Indexing your website

)

4. Upload or copy the files in your output directory to your website or CD-ROM. (see

What to do after

indexing

)

5. You should now have a functioning search page. You can customise the appearance of the search

page. (see

How do I customize the look of my search page?

)

6. Advanced users can also optimise the effectiveness of their search results by examining the log file,

adding key words on specific pages, and filtering out unwanted words, pages, or sections of pages.

(see

Advanced Options

)

1.8 Which search script platform should I use?

The search script is available in three different versions so that you can select what best suits your

method of distribution. The following versions are available:

· PHP

· ASP

· ASP.NET

· CGI

· Javascript

The server-side versions (PHP, ASP, ASP.NET or CGI) provide the best performance as they operate on

your own web server and is the recommended choice for an online website.

The client-side version (Javascript) lets you run the search engine from a CD-ROM or DVD distribution

with the benefit of not requiring any external software besides the use of Javascript enabled web

browsers. However, it is also more restricted in technical capability and efficiency than the server-side

versions.

The following flow-chart may help you determine which script platform to use.

Overview 15

*A site with approximately 65,000+ pages or 80,000+ unique words would be considered a big website.

**Advanced features include "context description" and "exact phrases", both of which are not available to

the JavaScript version due to limitations in the script platform.

Confused?

If you are not familiar with some of the above terminology, refer to the appendix

chapter

What is PHP , ASP , CGI or Javascript ?

1.9 What will the end result look like?

To give you an idea of what the resulting search page could look like, the following is a screenshot of a

Zoom search page running on our very own website (you can see this online and run searches on it

yourself at http://www.zoomsearchengine.com/search.php).

Zoom Search Engine16

1.10 Purchasing Zoom

If you wish to use Zoom for a larger website, or you are using it in a commercial project, require

professional support, custom features, or simply like the software and wish to support its development,

please consider purchasing one of the licenses available.

The Free Edition of Zoom is restricted to the typical size of a free, personal website (50 pages, 1 MB

files). It now handles all file formats supported in Zoom (including Acrobat PDF, Word DOC, etc.)

For larger websites or commercial developers, we recommend the Professional Edition license which is

capable of indexing up to 50,000 pages/files and unlimited file size.

For even larger sites, or a cross-site search engine spanning many different websites, we would

recommend the Enterprise Edition which has no limit on the number of pages or unique words you can

attempt to index (only limited by the amount of memory in your indexing computer).

For more information on the differences between these editions, please visit our web site:

http://www.zoomsearchengine.com/zoom/editions.html

1.11 Credits

Zoom Search Engine™ is developed by PassMark® Software. All scripts, binaries, and documentation

Overview 17

The Zoom Search Engine software, or a component thereof, uses the following libraries:

PCRE library, written by Philip Hazel, and copyright by the University of Cambridge, England.

application, commercial or non-commercial, at no cost.

Permission is granted to use UCData without restriction subject to conditions specified.

Porter Stemming algorithm by Martin Porter. PHP implementation by Richard Heyes, published for use

"free of charge for any purpose" on Martin Porter's website (http://tartarus.org/~martin/

PorterStemmer/), Feb 2005. ASP implementation based on code by Christos Attikos, published at

abovementioned URL, Jan 2005.

to use Snowball under the BSD license.

Indexing your website

Part

Indexing your website 19

2 Indexing your website

2.1 Using the Zoom Search Engine Indexer

The Zoom Indexer is a Windows application that scans your entire website and indexes the content and

information it finds on each page. It will then create all the files you need to upload to your website, for

you to have a running search engine.

The Zoom Indexer is a part of the Zoom Search Engine package that provides powerful custom search

functionality for your website or CD-ROM. For more information on the overall package, please see the

"Introduction" and "How Zoom works" sections.

The Indexer has two main modes of operation:

· Spider mode

· Offline mode

It also has a choice of four different platform options (PHP, ASP, Javascript, or CGI).

For more information on selecting a suitable platform, see Which search script platform should I use?

Getting started? First time users should follow the Step-by-step wizard to guide

them through the main options. Click on the magic wand in the toolbar to begin.

We would also recommend reading the rest of the Overview chapter, in particular

the "What should I do first?" section.

2.1.1 Spider mode

Spider mode indexes a remote copy of your website already uploaded and hosted on a web server. It

does this via the use of a ‘spider’, which starts from a given start page, and follow the links it finds on

each page. This allows the indexer to thoroughly index a website containing both static content (.htm and

.html files which do not change) and dynamically generated content (such as websites with a PHP or ASP

driven backend, message boards, etc.). It requires an established Internet connection.

Zoom Search Engine20

See also:

Start spider URL

Base URL

Output directory

2.1.2 Offline mode

Offline mode indexes a local copy of your website, stored on your hard disk. This is effective for static

web pages and allows the user to index a website without uploading it to a web server, maximizing

indexing speed and convenience. It can also be used for web pages that will be published on a disk or

CD-ROM, where a web server will not be available and does not require an Internet connection.

Indexing your website 21

See also:

Start directory

Base URL

Output directory

2.1.3 Start spider URL (spider mode only)

In spider mode, you are required to specify the URL from which the indexer will start the spider scanning

from. Typically, you would point this to the entrance page of your website, (such as index.html) so that it

will be able to find links to other pages on your website by following the links it finds on each page (as a

visitor would).

Also note that the spider indexing mode automatically skip links to external web sites, i.e. those that are

outside of the base URL defined (see below). This is to prevent indexing pages outside of the specified

website.

Advanced spider URL options: Clicking on the button will bring up a window which

allows you to add more spider URLs or specify advanced spider crawling options. This is particularly

helpful when indexing across multiple websites or domains.

Zoom Search Engine22

Spidering options

With each spider URL in this list you can specify the following options:

Index page and follow internal links

(default) – will index the contents of the page and follow any

internal links found (URLs beginning with the base URL).

Index page and follow internal and external links

– will index the contents of the page and follow

internal and external links (but only up to one level of external links – eg. it will scan each external

page linked from an internal page, but will not index external pages linked from external pages).

Index single page only

– will only index the contents of the specified page, and not follow any links

found.

Follow links only

– will only follow the links found on the specified page but will not index the

content of the page itself. The spider will then index and follow the links found on the pages that

are linked to from this page.

Follow all links on this page only

– will follow the links found on the specified page and index the

linked pages, but not follow any further links. This indexes only one level of links, that is, only

pages which are linked to this start point will be indexed.

You can also override the automatic base URL determined from this window, if necessary.

Indexing your website 23

Tip:

You can specify multiple base URLs for each individual start point. This allows

a start point to span across multiple domains or sub-domains. For more

information, see "Base URL".

Limits files for this start point

You can limit the number of files to index from this particular start point by checking this option. You

can specify a global limit for all start points on the "Limits" tab of the Configuration window. Note that

when both the global and individual limit is set, both settings will apply, so which ever limit is first

reached (ie: the lower limit of the two), will cause the indexer to stop indexing the current start

point.

Weighting for this start point

This adjusts the score weighting for the pages indexed under this start point. This can be used to

make pages found from a particular start point or domain to be ranked higher or considered more

important than pages from other start points. See "Weightings" for more information.

Import and export start points

You can also Import and Export additional URLs from a text file using the Import and Export button.

See "Importing and Exporting additional start URLs" for more information.

The number of start points you can have in this list are only limited by the system resources

available. However, the total number of pages indexed would still be limited by the indexing limits

(max. pages, max. unique words, etc.) specified on the "Limits" tab.

Zoom Search Engine24

2.1.4 Start directory (offline mode only)

The start directory specifies the local directory for the offline scanning to begin in. All sub-directories

under the start directory will also be scanned. In other words, you should point this at the folder in which

you have created the files for your website.

Advanced start folder options: Clicking on the button will bring up a window which

allows you to add other start folders to include in this index. This allows you to index multiple folders

(not already under the main start directory) and include them in the search index.

2.1.5 Base URL

This is the URL where your website will be published and uploaded to. For example, if your website will

be published at http://www.myisp.com/~me/index.html, then http://www.myisp.com/~me will be the

base URL of your website. This is used to determine the base location of each file on your website, so do

not specify the filename of the main page (i.e. index.html, home.htm, etc.).

In spider mode, this is automatically determined for you based on the URL of the start page

specified, but you can override it if necessary (click on the “More” button and select “Edit”). When

specifying your own base URL in spider mode, you can also list more than one base URL by

separating each with a semicolon (‘;’). For example, to allow a spider to follow links from the start

point “http://www.mysite.com/index.html”, to pages hosted under the “pages.mysite.com” domain,

you would have to specify a base URL of “http://www.mysite.com/;http://pages.mysite.com/”.

For CD-ROM/DVD distribution

For offline/local distribution, the base URL should be the relative path from where the search script will

be. It does not have to be a HTTP address. For example, if the files you have indexed will be placed in

the same directory as the search.html page on the CD, use “./” (which refers to the current directory) as

your base URL. This is generally recommended over the use of absolute paths such as “/” or “C:\myfiles

\”, which will raise compatibility issues between different operating systems (such as Macs). See

Appendix B if you are unfamiliar with relative paths for more information.

For offline or Intranet use

Note that the base URL can not be a file path (such as “C:\Myfiles\”) or UNC address (eg. “\\MyServer

\Files\”). Instead, you should use a valid file URL in the form of “file://MyServer/Files/”.

You could also consider using relative paths for your base URL, especially if you need to be able to move

the search files and host them on different servers. See Appendix B if you are unfamiliar with relative

paths for more information.

2.1.6 Output directory

This is the directory in which the index files generated will be saved. Usually you would put this in the

same directory as your website files so that they can be uploaded together. Note that all the files created

must be uploaded to the same directory.

See "Publishing your search engine on your website or CD-ROM" for information on what to do with the

files created in this folder, after successfully indexing your website.

Indexing your website 25

2.1.7 Platform

This setting selects the script platform, which you will host or distribute your search engine with. Select

from either PHP, ASP, ASP.NET or CGI for server-side searches, or Javascript format for client-side

searches.

If you do not know which format best suits your method of distribution, see "When to use a server-side

search engine (PHP, ASP, ASP.NET or CGI)" and "When to use a client-side search engine (Javascript)".

Note: Clicking on the CGI option will popup a window allowing you to select the

target OS on which the CGI will run (this would be the OS of your web server).

See also:

What is PHP?

What is ASP?

What is ASP.NET?

What is Javascript?

What is CGI?

2.1.8 Start indexing

This starts the indexer using the current settings in the mode selected. When the process finishes,

“Indexing completed” will appear in the log window on the right and the indexer will generate the data

files in the output directory.

2.1.9 Stop indexing

This requests the indexing process to stop. Note that the indexer will attempt to finish indexing the file it

was up to, and will generate functional index data files before stopping completely.

2.1.10 Indexing status

The Status tab provides an overview of the indexing process such as the number of words found, the

number of links found, and the number of files found for each different file extension.

For more information on the current indexing progress, click on the "Log" tab.

Zoom Search Engine26

Hint:

Use the information available here to determine the size and limits of the site

being indexed, and whether further configuration with the Scan options, Skip

options, or Limits is necessary.

Errors and warnings

The errors and warnings list in the top right corner of the Status tab, is a summary of any errors,

warnings or broken links that the Indexer has come across for this indexing session. Double-clicking on

the "View" column will bring you to the "Log" tab, with all message types disabled except for the

corresponding error you selected here. This allows you to track down specific error messages or broken

link messages even when you have a very large Log.

The

Last logged error message

shows the most recent error or warning message that was written to the

Log window.

Thread status

This bottom section of the Status tab gives a clear indication of what each thread is doing during

indexing. You can only have one Indexer thread at any one time, but the number of download threads

(labelled as "DL #1", etc.) can be adjusted for Spider Mode indexing on the "Spider options" panel of the

Configuration tab.

Indexing your website 27

System information and memory status

This reports the resources used and/or available on your computer during indexing. Note that it will not

update except only while indexing is under way. You should use this to determine the actual memory

usage of your "Limits" settings, and note when your computer may be under equipped for an indexing

task you have set.

2.1.11 Log

The "Log" tab provides detailed information on the indexing process. You should evaluate these messages

to determine what files have been indexed, what files have not been indexed (and why), and any other

possible issues to address during indexing.

You can now toggle the message types to be displayed on-the-fly. This will help you track down errors

easier.

Note that some these settings may not be available if you have configured the Index Log mode (on the

"Index Log " panel of the Configure tab) to "Basic".

Click the “Show all” button to quickly check all options or “Reset to default” to return the log settings to

the default options.

Indexing

Messages relating to which files have been indexed and scanned

successfully.

Skipped

Messages about files which have been skipped or not scanned.

Filtered

Messages about files which have been filtered out by the

Content Filtering feature.

Spidering

Messages about the spidering process when indexing in spider

mode (eg. when links are found and queued for downloading).

Initialization

Messages regarding initializing memory or index data for Zoom.

Downloading

Messages regarding files being downloaded (in spider mode

only).

Uploading

Messages regarding files being uploaded with FTP.

File I/O

Messages regarding writing and reading of files such as the

index data files.

Information

Messages regarding miscellaneous information.

Thread info

Messages regarding multi-threaded activity (in spider mode

only)

Error

Messages regarding critical errors whilst indexing.

Warning

Messages regarding minor problems or issues that may need

attention with indexing.

Plugin

Messages regarding the use of plugins or processing of external

binary file formats such as PDF, DOC, PPT, etc.

Summary

End of indexing summary.

Zoom Search Engine28

Broken links

If a link is followed and found to be missing or invalid, this

option will report the original page where the broken link was

found. See "Broken link detection" for more information.

2.2 Configuring Zoom further

You can change everything from the indexing behaviour of the search engine, to the appearance and

features of the search results page from the Configuration window. Click on the

Configure

tab and select

the corresponding panel of options.

There are several groups of options presented which you can modify:

· Start options

· Scan options

· Skip options

· Spider options

· Search page

· Results layout

· Indexing options

· Limits

· Authentication

· FTP

· Languages

· Weightings

· Filtering

· Categories

· Sitemaps

· Synonyms

· Recommended links

· Index log

· Advanced

Indexing your website 29

2.2.1 Scan options

Scan Extensions

This is a list of the filename extensions that will be scanned by the indexer. If a file has an extension that

is not in this list then it will be skipped. Note that each file extension must begin with a "." (dot) character

or it will be ignored. Up to 50 extensions can be defined in this list.

When you add a new extension, Zoom will automatically determine the

File type

that it should be indexed

as. However, you can change this as required.

Checking the “

Scan files with no extensions

” option allows you to index files without any extension.

Checking the

"Scan files with unknown extensions"

option will analyse any unrecognized file extension

and attempt to index it accordingly (e.g. can detect a JPEG that has been misnamed as a .bin or any file

extension not in the above list and index it as a JPEG).

Zoom Search Engine30

You can double-click on each file extension (or click on the "

Configure

" button) to edit settings for that

particular file extension. This includes icon and thumbnail options for most file formats (see "Icons and

Thumbnails").

Note: While you can specify the "File type" for each extension, the way a file is

indexed can be dependent on the server's Content-Type response in

Spider Mode

This behaviour is necessary and desirable because a server may have a PHP

download script which returns a PDF file (for example), and in such a case, you

would want Zoom to obey the web server and treat the file returned as a PDF

document instead of a PHP page.

Optical Character Recognition (OCR) (Win10 only)

Enable OCR for image files will allow you to search for text that appear in any images. Note the quality of

the picture and the clarity of the text will affect the effectiveness of OCR.

(Only available in Win10 or

later)

Duplicate page detection

Checking this option enables the use of CRC signatures to ensure that only pages with unique content are

indexed. This is particularly useful for spider indexing websites with links to pages without a filename, for

instance, to a directory (eg: http://mywebsite.com/). These links may otherwise be indexed twice if there

is another link somewhere else on the website which points to the same place, but with the actual

filename specified (such as http://mywebsite.com/index.html, http://mywebsite.com/home.htm, etc.). It

is best to avoid this on your website and use a consistent linking method. However, you can also prevent

this by turning on this option.

Open all plugin file formats in a new window

When this option is enabled, all plugin supported file formats (e.g. PDF, DOC, PPT files, etc.) will open in

a new window when you click on them in the search results. Note that you will need to have plugins

installed and the required file extension added to the Extensions list for such file types to be indexed. See

"Plugins" for more information.

Override plugin timeout

When this option is enabled, a timeout limit is enforced for files being processed by a plugin. This avoids

corrupt or problematic files from hanging up the entire index session.

Indexing your website 31

2.2.2 Skip options

Page and folder skip list

This is a list of pages and folders that will not be scanned during the indexing process. Note that

filenames and paths are case sensitive. Typically you would want to filter pages that the user should

never be able to get to directly via the search function. Note that if the path to a page partially or fully

matches any entry in this list it will be filtered. For example, an entry of “\private\” will filter “\private

\file1.htm”, “\private\file2.htm” and “photos\private\athome.htm”.

Tip: You can also skip pages based on whether certain keywords are found or not

found within the page content. See "Content filtering" for more information.

As of V6, you can now also use the asterisk wildcard (*) to match a sequence of characters. For

example, an entry of "\private\*\index.html" will skip all files named "index.html" in a sub-folder within

"\private\".

Skip files or directories that begin with an underscore

Zoom Search Engine32

When this is enabled, files or directories beginning with an underscore (such as those kept by

Dreamweaver and FrontPage) will be ignored and skipped during Offline Mode indexing.

Word skip list

This is a list of words that will be filtered during the indexing process. Typically you would want to filter

some small words that appear on every page such as, “and”, “or”, “the”, etc. Depending on your site you

may also want to skip other words. For example, if your site had a thousand pages about different

aircrafts, you might want to remove the word “aircraft” from the index, as it would match every page on

your site.

Tip: If a skip word begins with a ‘*’ character then it will match and filter any word

that contains this keyword. For example, a skip word entry of “*fun” would filter

out the following words: “fun”, “funny” and “nofun”. Note that the ‘*’ character

must be at the beginning of the word for this to take effect.

Skip words less than x characters

You can now specify the minimum number of characters that a word must be before it is indexed. It is

defaulted to two characters so all single-character words are skipped.

Skipping sections of a page from being indexed

To exclude sections of a page (such as headers, footers, and navigation menus), please see "Skipping

sections of a page".

Indexing your website 33

2.2.3 Thread options

Single-threaded mode

This is typically the slower option. But it can be useful when you need to reduce the memory (RAM)

required, or to troubleshoot your indexing problems.

In offline mode, this will only use one thread to linearly read in files and index them.

In spider mode, this option uses only one dedicated thread for downloading files. While this is typically

the slower option, it can provide reasonable speed when indexing a site with a fast connection. It is also

recommended when you are trying to follow the spider’s crawling path, to determine if it is scanning the

pages you are expecting.

Multi-thread mode

This is recommended to increase the speed of indexing. However, it will use more memory and make it

hard to troubleshoot problems (as many things are happening at the same time).

In offline mode, this will use multiple threads to read and index files in different sub-folders at the same

time.

In spider mode, this option allows you to specify more than one dedicated thread for downloading files in

spider mode. It allows Zoom to download multiple files in the background whilst indexing at the same

time.

Zoom Search Engine34

2.2.4 Spider options

Spider downloading options

These are options which control the way in which Zoom will download files when it is in spider mode.

Note that it does not apply for offline mode indexing.

Reload all files (do not use cache)

Check this option to ensure that all files are downloaded from the site and that the cached copies of

pages are not used.

Spider throttling

This option allows you to add or increase a delay between requests made to a web server when indexing

in Spider Mode. This can be useful when you are crawling a web server which is under heavy load and

you wish to minimize any additional load that can be placed on a server during the spidering process.

Indexing your website 35

Note that in most cases, the spider should not put much strain on a web server as it is limited by the

bandwidth and processing capability of one single desktop computer. This option should only be

necessary when indexing a server which is overloaded with an unreasonable number of websites or

tasks, running on underpowered hardware. Using this option will significantly slow down your spider

indexing process. For most other situations, we recommend setting this to "

No delay between pages

Enable "robots.txt" support

When this option is enabled, Zoom will look for "robots.txt" files when indexing a website in Spider Mode.

The "robots.txt" file can specify instructions for spiders and other user-agents, on what pages should be

excluded from indexing (similar in effect to the "Skip pages list") and also whether a crawl delay should

be required (similar in effect to the "Spider throttling" option).

Zoom will download a "robots.txt" file (if available) for each start point, so this method allows you to have

per start point skip pages and throttling settings. It is also a good idea when indexing third party

websites, so that you can make sure your spider is obeying the webmaster's rules.

Note that Zoom will only locate a "robots.txt" file for each start point, at the root level of the domain being

indexed. It will not parse "robots.txt" files which are located in sub-folders. This means you should have

all your sub-folder robots settings located within the one "robots.txt" file, specifying your rules relative to

the base URL.

For example, the following "robots.txt" file will block Zoom from indexing any files in a folder named

"secret" and any files named "private.html". It will also force a delay of 5 seconds between requests to

this start point.

# this is my robots.txt for http://www.mysite.com/ (this comment is ignored)

User-agent: ZoomSpider

Disallow: /secret/

Disallow: private.html

Crawl-delay: 5

For more information on the "robots.txt" file format, please refer to online resources such as http://www.robotstxt.org/

When this option is enabled, Zoom will also support the "robots" meta tag for "noindex" and "nofollow".

This allows you to specify certain pages to be excluded from indexing (or crawled for links) by simply

adding a tag such as the following within the page head:

Note that specifying "index" or "follow" values in the robots meta tag will have no effect as this is the

default behaviour for all pages scanned.

Parse for links in JavaScript code

Some links on your web page may be embedded within JavaScript code (e.g. pop-up navigation menus).

These links are generally considered to be search engine unfriendly, because a web spider is unable to

execute the script and crawl the resulting links.

While Zoom will not execute JavaScript, this option asks Zoom to attempt to look for URLs within the

JavaScript code and crawl/follow any valid links that it finds. This will typically find some of the links in

your JavaScript but not necessarily all of them. It also increases the time it takes to index a web page.

However, it can be a decent solution if you have many links within JavaScript code and do not have the

time to fix your web page to be more search engine friendly.

You can find more information on indexing JavaScript links and better long-term solutions explained in our

online FAQ here: http://www.zoomsearchengine.com/zoom/support/faq_problems.html#javascriptmenus

Zoom Search Engine36

Scan files linked via “file://” URLs in spider mode

This allows the spider mode to follow file:// style hypertext links. This can be useful for indexing an

Intranet where you may have accessible files on the web server as well as the shared drives on the

network.

Check thumbnails exist on website before using URL

This option applies for search result thumbnails configured as described in "Icons and thumbnails".

With this option enabled, Zoom will check each thumbnail URL and see if the image file exists on the web

server (at the time of indexing) before deciding to use the determined URL for the thumbnail. This

prevents "broken image" thumbnails.

Use offline folder for .desc files

This option allows you to specify custom description (.desc) files for your plugin supported files, by

hosting them locally in an offline folder.

It allows you to override incorrect meta data on remotely hosted files (possibly on sites that you can not

change, or where you do not wish to host the .desc files). For more information on .desc files, see "Using

custom descriptions (.desc) files".

With this setup, you can now index external sites using Spider Mode, and and the Indexer will look for the

.desc files for any plugin supported file formats (such as .pdf, .doc, etc.) in the local directory. This allows

you to specify custom .desc files without having to host them up on the remote web site.

The offline .desc files need to include the full domain name and URL path in its filename. This is usually

everything after the "http://" or "https://" prefix. It must also end in ".desc" (see examples below).

However, since a number of characters possible in a URL are not valid as filenames, you must encode

these characters in their hexadecimal form and precede them with a "%" sign. This is similar to the HTTP

encoding required for URLs. The following is a list of the characters in URL which must be encoded.

Character

Encoded

%5C

%2F

%3A

%2A

%3F

%22

%3C

%3E

%7C

For each of the above characters in a URL, substitute them with the Encoded form of the character when

naming a .desc file for that URL.

Indexing your website 37

Here are some examples of URLs and their corresponding .desc filenames,

Example 1,

URL:

http://www.mysite.com/files/mydocument.pdf

.desc filename:

www.mysite.com%2Ffiles%2Fmydocument.pdf.desc

Example 2,

URL:

http://www.mysite.com/download.php?fileid=123

.desc filename:

www.mysite.com%2Fdownload.php%3Ffileid=123.desc

Of course the prefered solution would be to create documents with correct meta data in the first place.

But when this hasn't been done, local .desc files can provide more accurate searches and better looking

results.

2.2.5 Search page

These are options specific to changing the appearance, or behaviour of the search page from which

searches are entered and results are shown.

Zoom Search Engine38

Search Form Appearance

The search form is the area of the search page where you can enter a search query, select parameters

and submit the search. Here you can choose from “

Advanced

” (with full options) to “

Basic

” (simple search

box), to “

Do not generate

”. With the latter option, the script will not generate the search box. This allows

you to create your own search form in your search template HTML file (or provide the search interface

elsewhere, such as in a separate frame). Note that the generated search form is useful because it can

remember the entries of the previous search query.

If you wish to specify your own search form, please refer to "How can I add a search form to my menus,

main page, etc.?"

Indexing your website 39

Results linking

This option defines how clicking on a search result link will open the page. The options available are:

· The current window (default)

· A new window

· A frame or window with the specified name.

Note that this is effectively equivalent to a target= attribute in an anchor HREF link in HTML.

Exact phrase

This option is not available in the Javascript version, or when context descriptions are disabled.

This feature allows users to search for words in a specific order as they appear on a page by surrounding

the words in quotes (eg. a search for "red car" (with double quotes) will not match "car red" or "red fast

car").

Note: Exact phrase searches can be significantly exhaustive (and thus, slow)

depending on how common the words in the search phrase are, on your site.

Because of this, it is a user-defined option whether to allow users to enter exact

phrase searching (or ignore them and treat them as multiple keywords, as in

previous versions).

The Optimization switch on the Limits tab allows you to eliminate the chances of

slow, exhaustive searches. Changing this setting will (among other things)

decrease the chances of exhaustive searches. When a phrase is entered that is too

slow to search thoroughly, a limited set of results are returned and a note is

displayed advising the user to specify a more precise search phrase (usually by

adding some less common words to the existing phrase).

Search improvement options

Provide option to "Sort results by date"

When this is enabled, visitors will be able to sort results by Relevancy, Date (oldest first), or Date

(newest first). You can also specify the default sort method here.

Note: the date is determined by the last-modified date and time of the file during indexing. For files

which do not have a useful modified date or time (eg. dynamically generated web pages and server-

side scripts), use a Meta tag to specify this information (see "Specifying a last-modified date for your

web pages").

Enable Date Range searching

When this option is enabled, the visitor will be able to specify a date range which search results must

fall between. The user must specify a

From

date and a

date with the date picker control (or they

can type in the date). Please see

Date Range Searching

for more information.

Enable Domain Diversity in first 3 results

When this option is enabled, Zoom will ensure the first 3 results come from different domains (e.g.

www.domain1.com, www.someotherdomain.com, www.thirddom.com). This can be useful for

search engines indexing more than one site and you do not want one or two sites dominating the

search results because it contains the most content.

Zoom Search Engine40

Provide spelling suggestions when less than x results found

This option is not available when the Javascript platform is selected.

This option provides users with alternate spelling suggestions for their search query when less than the

specified number of results are found.

Default to “match all search words”

This will set the default searching method to “

match all search words

” instead of “

match any search

words

”.

Show time taken to perform searches

When enabled, the search page will measure the time it takes to perform each search process, and

display a “

Search took x seconds

” line at the bottom of each search page.

Show Zoom info line

This displays a “

” line at the bottom of each search page.

ASP.NET options (ASP.NET server control only)

These are options to control the behaviour of the ASP.NET search page.

By default, the server control expects a master <form> ... </form> tag so it does not generate this for

your search form. To change this behaviour, select "

Generate <form> tags for search form

Also by default, the ASP.NET Server Control will utilize PostBack to submit different search options (e.g.

changing sort order, switching to the next page of search results). To change this behaviour, you can

uncheck this option.

Indexing your website 41

2.2.6 Results layout

Search results layout

This set of options allows you to modify the appearance of the search results. You can select or disable

the elements that should be displayed per search result. Note the Preview pane at the bottom of the

window gives you a representation of what your results may look like with your current selected settings.

Result number

: Displays the rank number of the search result, with the most relevant page being

numbered 1.

Title of page

: Displays the link to the result with the page title as the link text. When disabled, the link

text will simply be the URL.

Meta description

: Displays the Meta description when available.

Image

: Allows and icon or thumbnail to appear alongside search results. Images will only appear for

files which have a ZOOMIMAGE tag specified or an icon or thumbnail configured for that file

extension. See "Icons and Thumbnails" for more information.

Zoom Search Engine42

Context description

: Displays the surrounding words from the content of the page where the

searched word was found. Note that this is not available when Page Content is not being indexed. It

is also not available for the Javascript version due to technical constraints with the scripting language.

Context size

: The number of words surrounding the searched word that should be displayed as part

of the context description.

Terms matched

: The number of user searched terms that were matched on this page.

Score

: A score representing the relevance of the page found, depending on the number of words

matched on the page, and where the word was found on that page (can be configured with Word

boosting parameters set in the Indexing Options tab).

Date

: Displays the date for the page. This is determined by the Last Modified date and time for that

particular file. When this information is not available, no date is displayed. Note that pages that are

dynamically generated by server-side scripts (e.g. PHP or ASP pages) often have no date associated

with them unless they are scripted to return a date. See "Specifying a last-modified date for your

web pages" for more information.

Highlighting options

Words matched in search results

This option enables the highlighting of keywords found in the search results. You can customize the

appearance of this highlighting by changing the CSS of the search page template. See “Fonts and

colours” below.

Jump to match and highlight within document

This option enables support for highlighting to occur on the actual page of your website when you

click on a search result. However, this requires you to add some Javascript to each page of your site

where you want this feature to take effect. It will highlight the word that the user was looking for in

the search engine, as well as scroll the window down to the first appearance of the word. For

instructions on how to setup this feature, see "Enable jump to match and highlight within document".

Fonts and colours

You can change the fonts, text colours, and text styles of your search results by editing the CSS styles

defined at the top of the template HTML file. Clicking on the Edit HTML template button will open up the

search template source file in your default HTML editor.

See "How do I customize the look of my search page?" for more information and a definition of the CSS

styles you can use to change the appearance of the search results.

Indexing your website 43

2.2.7 Indexing options

What to index

You can specify the parts of a page that should be included or excluded from indexing here. This includes

the page title, content, and filename. Meta information can also be indexed such as meta descriptions,

keywords, and author information. By excluding certain sections of pages, you can make index data files

smaller and the indexing procedure faster, and less memory intensive. It may also help make your

searches more accurate by including or excluding only the relevant sections of a page.

URL domain

will index the domain name, such that when indexing the page "http://www.mysite.com/

section1/index.html", we will index the words "www mysite com" (if dots are not enabled for word rules).

The full domain "www.mysite.com" would be indexed as one word if dots are enabled for joining words.

URL path

will index the path name as well such that when indexing the page "http://www.mysite.com/

section1/index.html", we will index "section1".

Dublin Core meta data can also be indexed. By enabling this option, Zoom will index

DC.Title

DC.Subject

and

DC.Identifier

meta tags as described by the

Dublin Core Metadata Initiative

(DCMI).

Zoom Search Engine44

Note that "

Link text

" and "

ALT text for images

" only affect the indexing of these elements for the

target or

destination file

. That is, if a text link appears on "pageA.html" to "imageB.jpg", with the link text (or ALT

text) "picture of my pets", then these words will be indexed for the file "imageB.jpg", and NOT for

"pageA.html".

Indexing word rules

This allows you to specify which characters should be allowed to act as a join character between two

words. Otherwise, these characters will act as separators of words (for example, if the ‘dash/hyphen’

character is a join character, words such as “web-based” will be indexed as one word. Otherwise, it

would be split into two words, “web” and “based”). Note that the character must be immediately

preceded and followed by another valid character to be indexed.

A list of the characters available for this option:

Name

Character

Example words indexed

Dots

F.B.I.

.NET

www.mysite.com

32.10

Hyphens

web-site

Underscores

temporary_name

Apostrophes

John's

Hash sign

#3218B

Serial#

ID#

Dollar sign

$50

Comma

60,000

Colon

Ref:A

Exhibit:A

Ampersand

A&B

&var

Slashes

either/or

12/5/2007

\myfiles\pages.txt

@ sign

bob@mycompany

bob@mycompany.com (with Dots enabled)

Indexing options

Index meta tags outside <head> section

will allow meta information (all <meta> tags including <title>

tags) to be extracted from outside of the <head>...</head> section. When this is disabled (by default),

these tags are only indexed when they appear within the <head> section as per HTML standards.

HTML5 indexing

Select the HTML5 tags to be included or excluded from your index.

Broad numeric matching

Indexing your website 45

This option will help matches across number formats and is particularly useful for prices, phone numbers

and serial numbers.

When you enable

English digit grouping

, a search for "12345.67" will match "$12,345.67", as well as

"$12345.67".

When you enable

European digit grouping

, a search for "12.345,67" will match "$12.345,67" as well as

"12345,67".

Rewrite links

This option allows you to rewrite the indexed URLs of the pages indexed. This can be useful if you are

spidering a development version of your site on a test server (eg. http://test.mycompany.com/) and

creating index files to go on the live server (eg. http://www.mycompany.com/). You would do this by

specifying rewrite options to replace all instances of "http://test.mycompany.com/" in the indexed URLs

with "http://www.mycompany.com/".

You could also use this option to change all the search result links to be relative rather than absolute by

replacing the domain (eg. "http://www.mysite.com/") with a relative path (eg. "./" or "../"). We only

recommend this for users who are very familiar with relative linking and understand that the linking

would only work if the generated search files are placed in an appropriate folder on the server.

Note: Using the Rewrite Links option disables the ability to use incremental

indexing on the produced set of index files. This means you will not be able to

perform an incremental update, or add/remove pages from the index without re-

indexing your site entirely. For more information on these features, see

"Incremental indexing".

Note: Sitemaps are also affected by the Rewrite Links option. This means that

your text and XML sitemaps will contain the URL as they would be after applying

the rewrite link rules, and not the URLs as indexed. Be careful with XML sitemaps,

since you need to specify a Sitemap Base URL for which the pages must fall within,

or otherwise it will be filtered out. You will need to make sure that the Rewrite Link

settings do not change the URL such that it does not satisfy the Sitemap Base URL

any more. For more information, please see "Sitemaps".

2.2.8 Limits

These are the defined limits of the indexer, setting the maximum number of files to scan, maximum

number of unique words to index, maximum file size scanned, and the number of characters used for the

description of each file.

In the free edition of Zoom, these limits are restricted to a typical size of a free, personal website (50

pages, 15,000 unique words, 100,000 bytes, and 150 characters respectively).

For larger websites, or commercial projects, we recommend the Professional Edition license which

allows you to change these limits manually, up to a maximum of 50,000 pages.

For even larger sites, or a cross-site search engine spanning many different websites, we would

recommend the Enterprise Edition which has no limit on the number of pages or unique words you can

attempt to index (only limited by the amount of memory in your indexing computer).

Zoom Search Engine46

For more information on the differences between these editions, please visit our webpage at:

http://www.zoomsearchengine.com/zoom/editions.html

Max files to index

This specifies the number of web pages or files that can be scanned and included in the index.

Note that in Spider Mode, each URL will count as one one file.

Max. file size indexed

This is the maximum size in KB (kilobytes) of a file that can be scanned. This is not the total size of all

files indexed, just the size of the largest file to index. Also note that it is specified in KB, which means

1024 KB = 1 MB.

The notice message that appears when you specify over 10 MB is only there to warn users who

accidentally over-specify this amount, due to confusing KB with bytes.

Max Description length

This is the number of characters used for the static description of each file (either the Meta description or

an extracted portion of the content) in the search results listing. By increasing this amount, you can

include a larger portion of text as the page description in your search results.

Truncate titles longer than x

When this option is enabled, Zoom will truncate long page titles before indexing them. This prevents

pages with very long titles from stretching out the layout of the search results unnecessarily.

Limit files per start point

This allows you to specify a limit for each start point of the indexer, before it stops, and moves on to the

next start point. It can not be greater than the maximum pages to scan limit specified earlier. You can

also specify a different limit for each individual start point from the "Advanced spider URL options"

window. Note that when both the global and individual limit is set, both settings will apply, so which ever

limit is first reached (ie: the lower limit of the two), will cause the indexer to stop indexing the current

start point.

Limit words per file

This allows you to specify the maximum number of words to index from each file. Once this limit is

reached, the indexer will move on to indexing the next file. This can be useful if you are indexing a very

large archive of content, and only consider the first 100 words on a page to be useful. Another example is

when you are indexing PDF documents, which may contain many pages. Using this feature you can limit

the indexing to the words on the first page (with an approximation of 600 words per page for example).

Optimization

This slider bar allows you to control the behaviour of the search script or CGI when searching large sites.

It allows you to give preference to either faster searches - at the cost of accuracy and potentially omitting

some search results, or more accurate search results - at the expense of slower searching. This is

Indexing your website 47

particularly influential on exact phrase matching, and searches which may return a huge number of

results (eg. over 1000).

For the PHP and ASP versions, this control currently only reduces the accuracy of exact phrase searches

(which means that it may miss some phrases) and only gains some speed when performing a phrase

search.

For the CGI version, it controls the maximum number of matches for a search term that is considered

before asking the user to specify a more specific or less common search query. Since the CGI version is

already very fast and efficient, it is really only worth changing if you are searching 100,000+ pages or

more. With the default settings, we have tested Zoom to search over a million pages in less than a

second (this can vary depending on the content indexed).

2.2.9 Authentication

This tab allows you to enter login and password details to spider a secure site that requires

authentication.

There are two common implementations of authentication on websites:

(1) HTTP authentication

(2) Cookie/session based authentication

You will need to identify the type of authentication you require.

HTTP authentication

HTTP authentication usually appears as a special login window (when you access the page in your

browser) and is a standardised method of authenticating over HTTP, implemented by the web server.

Example 1. A typical website with HTTP authentication accessed via Internet Explorer

If your website uses HTTP authentication, you can simply enter your login information into Zoom (under

the "Authentication" tab of the Configuration window) and the spider will automatically login when

required and index the protected parts of your website.

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Note: Authentication information is saved in the ZCFG file when you select Save

configuration from the file menu. The password is obfuscated, but not heavily

encrypted. For sites with security sensitive information, we recommend creating a

special user account for indexing on the web server where possible, so you can

disable this user account after indexing.

Cookie or session based authentication

Cookie-based authentication however, usually appears as a form on a page, and is implemented by

server-side scripts (such as PHP or ASP or Cold Fusion).

Example 2. A typical website with cookie-based (or session-based) authentication

Zoom now provide a way to automatically login such pages. To do so you will need to provide the

following information and settings:

· Use cookies from Windows and IE: This option enables cookie support in Zoom. You will need to

check this option to access cookie-based authentication websites. Note that Zoom uses Windows'

internal cookie cache (as part of WinInet) which means that it shares cookies with Internet Explorer.

· Automatic login on following page (URL): Here, you should specify the URL to the page containing

the login form. Using the example above (Example 2 screenshot), this would be "http://

www.mysite.com/secure/login.php". On this page, the HTML for the form may look like the following:

Password: <input type="password" name="pass" size="8"><br>

</form>

Indexing your website 49

It is important to look at the HTML for the login form because you will need the name for the login

variable and the password variable in the next steps.

· Login variable name: This is the name of the login input text box. That is, it is the part after "name="

for the input tag where you will enter your login. In the above HTML example, this would be

"username".

· Your login: This is the actual login you would be typing into the text box normally. In the above

example, this would be "bob".

· Password variable name: This is the name of the password input text box. It would be the part after

"name=" for the input tag where you enter your password. In the above HTML example, this would be

"pass".

· Your password: This is the actual password you would be typing into the text box.

· Additional parameters (if required): Some web sites require more than just an user name and

password to be submitted to login. They may want the name of the button you've clicked on because

the form has multiple "submit" buttons (e.g. "Login", "Sign up", "Recover lost password"). In such

cases, you would need to specify the additional parameters required in this field. The parameter should

be specified in the format of HTTP GET parameters, that is: parameterName=parameterValue with the

ampersand character (&) joining multiple values. For example,

submitButton=Login&hiddenParam=1

Note that the automatic login process will submit these values to the action= URL specified for the form.

It will also pass along any hidden variables within that form as they are often also required by the login

process.

Remember: If you are using one of the above methods to allow the spider to login

to your cookie or session-based authenticated site, you need to make sure that the

spider does not follow a link to the "logout" page, subsequently logging itself out of

your website. You can prevent this by simply specifying the logout page in the "Skip

pages and folder list" (in the Configuration window, under the "Skip options" tab),

eg. "logout.asp" or "&logout=1", etc.

When automatic login will not work

Automatic login may not work on some sites or forums with anti-spider/anti-bot mechanisms that prevent

exactly this type of automatic logins (they are usually put in place to avoid spam bots). In such cases, you

will need to manually login with Internet Explorer. While making sure you have "Use cookies from

Windows and IE" enabled in Zoom. With this feature enabled, you can login to your website using IE, and

then (without logging out first), start indexing in spider mode. The spider would be authenticated with the

required cookie due to the shared cookie cache.

2.2.10 FTP

Clicking on this tab will bring up your settings for uploading files to your web server via FTP. See the

dedicated "FTP" section for more information.

2.2.11 Autocomplete

When this feature is enabled, as users type in the search box, a list of suggestions will appear

immediately to complete their search query based on your list of words, or popular searches determined

Zoom Search Engine50

from your Search Statistics Log. This feature is also known as "auto-suggest".

It is most effective if you check the option to "Include top x most popular search terms from

Statistics log file" and provide it with a file path or URL to the statistics log file (created in "Configure"-

>"Advanced"). This will then automatically update (on each indexing) with popular search terms (which

yield results) submitted by the visitors on your website.

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 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).

The feature will work best if A) you have a server that is fairly fast and B) there is reasonable low latency

between the client and the server. If you have a slow machine with high latency means that auto-

complete might not keep up with the user's typing speed.

2.2.12 Languages

Zoom provides options to cater to searching sites of different languages and encodings. For additional

information, please see “International / foreign language support”.

Encoding and character sets

This will be the encoding and character set (charset) of the resultant search page and index files. Zoom

will scan files and convert the content from the character set specified on the web pages to the encoding

selected here. Files which do not have a charset specified will be assumed to be the character set

specified here.

Change your settings regarding foreign language support and character encoding. Firstly, if your website

uses Unicode UTF-8, you must enable the “Use Unicode” option. Otherwise, specify the encoding (also

Indexing your website 51

known as charset) used. “windows-1252” is the most common option for English, French, German, and a

number of other Latin based languages.

Tip: If you are indexing a single site (or several sites) where all the pages use the

same charset, you should simply set this to be the same charset which is used on

your website. However, if you are indexing web pages of varying character sets,

we would recommend setting this to UTF-8 so that you can have a universal search

page which will work with all the different languages. The content will be

converted to Unicode before being indexed.

International searching options

Enable accent/diacritic/ligature insensitivity: This will map all occurrences of accented

characters to their non-accented equivalent (eg. ó, ò, ô, etc. will all be treated as “o”). With this

enabled, a user can enter the search word “cliché” and it will find all occurrences of the word on your

website spelt as either “cliché” or “cliche". You can now specifically enable or disable this feature for

accents (ó, ò, ô, õ, etc.), umlauts (ä, ë, ï, ö, ü), and ligatures (å, ø, æ).

Tip: Note that when this feature is enabled, and highlighting is also enabled, some

words found in the context description may not be highlighted.

Use digraphs for umlauts: When this option is enabled together with umlaut insensitivity,

characters like "ö" will be considered the same as "oe" as opposed to "o". Similarly, "ä"="ae",

"ü"="ue", etc.

Support single-case languages (eg. asian languages): This should only be used if you are

using a language where there is no case-difference and problems can occur when the script or

indexer attempts to convert case (such as some East Asian languages).

Substring matches for all searches: This will mean the script will consider search words that

occurs within another word to be considered a match. (Eg. a search for the word “hot” will match

“hotcake”, “shotgun”, etc.) This may be useful for East Asian languages where words are not

distinguished by spaces and you always want to search for a single character within a set of words.

Strip Arabic diacritic marks in words: This option will strip diacritical marks from Arabic words

which are typically never searched for, and is only used to represent accurate pronunciation of the

word.

Stemming

This option is not available in the JavaScript version.

When this feature is enabled, search results will match similar words or words which are derivatives of

each other (e.g. plurals). For example, searching for the word "fish" will return pages containing the

words "fishes", "fishing", etc.

The CGI version features an improved stemming feature which can be configured for languages other

than English. PHP or ASP only supports English stemming. Stemming is not available when single-case

matching (i.e. "Support single-case languages") is enabled.

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Note: If your website contains multi-lingual content (that is, your index will need to

allow the searching of text in more than one language), then it may be best to

disable stemming. The stemming algorithms are language specific, and will not

work well when it is imposed on text of a different language.

Search page language

You can modify the text that appears on the search page and search results, by customizing the Zoom

Language Files (.ZLANG files). Almost every bit of text on the search page can be modified or translated,

including “Search results for…” and “x results found”, etc. This allows you to translate the search page to

the language of your choice, without having to modify the search script.

Zoom also comes with a few pre-translated language files which both serve as examples, and allow you

to create French or German search pages straight out of the box, by selecting it from the drop-down

menu.

For more information on how to create your own translations, please refer to “Translating the search

page”.

2.2.13 Weightings

Word weighting

These drop-downs allow you to increase or decrease the importance of words found, depending on

whether it was found within the following:

· Title of the page

· Meta description of the page

· Headings of the page (ie. within <H1> and <H2> tags)

· Filename

· Meta keywords or ZOOMWORDS tag of the page

· Link text and ALT text for images

The boosting can be specified between 10 levels, ranging from -5 Deboost to Normal, to +5 Boost. For

example, if the Title is set to have a word weighting of "+2 Boost", then each words which appear within

the page title would be treated as though have appeared twice on that page.

This makes it possible for you to give priority to pages (placing it higher up in the results), when the word

is found in certain sections of the page.

Page boosting

You can also boosts ALL words found on specific pages, by use of the ZOOMPAGEBOOST meta tag, eg.

Putting this on the most important page on your site would help make it appear higher up in the search

results. You can probably use less than 5 to do the same thing on a small site. Similarly, a negative value

would decrease the weight of words on that page. ZOOMPAGEBOOST values can also range from -5 to 5.

Indexing your website 53

Word position

By changing this adjustment, you are altering the preference given to the following:

· Multi-word matches that are found closer together on the same page.

· Pages where words are found throughout the whole page (and not limited to a section of the page).

· Occurrences of words found at the top of the page.

Content density

This is an automatic weighting adjustment that is made by the indexer, based on the word density of the

page. With “Standard adjustment”, the weighting of words found in a large file (such as a 50+ page PDF

document) will be lowered so as to prevent such files from swamping the results and always considered

the most relevant. This will effectively give preference to small and medium sized documents. “Strong

adjustment” provides an even greater level of scaling, and “No adjustment” would disable this feature so

that all files are treated equally.

Give preference to short URLs

This is an automatic adjustment made by the Indexer, based on the length of the URL of the page being

indexed. With "Standard adjustment", the weighting of a page may be slightly lowered if the URL is

considered lengthy. Similarly, a page with a short URL may receive an increase in weighting. This will

effectively give preference to "home pages" of the site, as opposed to those which are several folders

deep. "Strong adjustment" provides an even greater level of scaling, and "No adjustment" would disable

this feature so that all files are treated equally regardless of their URL length.

2.2.14 Content filtering

Content Filtering allows you to filter out an entire page based on words found within the page's content.

A list of filter words can be entered, prefixed with a "+" or a "-". You can specify positive filters (keywords

beginning with a "+" character) which means that only pages with these words will be indexed, or you

can specify negative filters (keywords beginning with a "-" character) meaning that pages containing

these words will NOT be indexed.

This can be useful for two reasons:

1. It helps if you want to create a specialised 'vertical' search engine. For example you could create a

search engine about pets. In this case the word filter list might look like:

+dog

+cat

+bird

+mouse

+hamster

+pet

2. You might want to avoid indexing some types of content. For example if you were building a

religious search engine or a search engine for children, you might want to use negative filters:

-adult

-casino

-sex

You can also filter out pages based on the URL by using the Skip options by using the skip pages list. This

method however, requires that you know the pages' URLs in advance, and manually determine which

Zoom Search Engine54

page has wanted or unwanted content. This is not always possible when indexing external sites, so

content filtering solves this problem.

Tip: Note that content based filtering will be less efficient than URL based filtering

because each page must be downloaded before it can be filtered. With URL based

filtering (using the "Skip pages" list), the page can be discarded before it is

downloaded, thus speeding up the indexing process. So URL filtering should still be

used when possible.

Content filtering is applied to the HTML source code of the page being scanned. This means that you can

filter by HTML tags, for example:

-<meta name="robots" content="noindex">

However, note that this means that support for filtering by exact phrases is limited because the words

may be broken up by HTML tags such as line breaks, comments, etc. (For example, it will not match if we

are trying to filter out pages containing the phrase "adults only", and the page actually contains the HTML

"adults<br>only").

2.2.15 Categories

Clicking on this tab will bring up the Categories manager. See the following "Categories" section for more

information.

2.2.16 Sitemaps

This option allows you to generate a plain text sitemap (compatible with Yahoo Sitemaps) and a XML

sitemap (compatible with Google Sitemaps) for your website at the same time as having Zoom index your

website.

Sitemaps can be useful for submitting your websites to Internet-wide search engines such as Google and

Yahoo, helping their spiders index your website more quickly and increasing your web presence. You may

also find it useful for maintenance or other development purposes. The sitemap includes information such

as the last modified date and the relative priority of the page within the website. Note that you should

only create sitemaps for individual websites (and not sitemaps that span multiple websites).

Tip: Note that you can use Zoom's Incremental Indexing to update your search

index, as well as your sitemap, in one go without having to re-spider your entire

website.

Text file URL list (Yahoo Sitemap compatible)

By selecting this option, Zoom will create a file named "urllist.txt" in your output directory at the end of

indexing. This is a simple text file containing a full list of the web pages that have been indexed,

compliant with the Yahoo Sitemap requirements, and can be submitted to Yahoo for search engine

submissions and other search engines accepting a similar sitemap format. It could also, of course, be

used for your personal development or maintenance purposes, to keep track of the active files on your

website.

XML sitemap (Google Sitemap compatible)

Indexing your website 55

By selecting this option, Zoom will create a XML sitemap which is compatible with the Google Sitemap

specifications. The files will be created in your output directory at the end of indexing.

As required by the Google Sitemap protocol, each XML file can only contain a maximum of 50,000 URLs.

Multiple XML sitemap files are created when a website exceeds this number of pages (named

"sitemap.xml", "sitemap2.xml", "sitemap3.xml" and so forth). A sitemap index file is also created which

contains a list of these individual sitemap files ("sitemap_index.xml").

For more information on the Google Sitemap protocol, you can visit the official web page here:

https://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/docs/en/protocol.html

Sitemap Base URL

Note that a

Sitemap Base URL

is required to generate a XML sitemap. This is necessary for two reasons:

1. To determine the URL of your split sitemap files (e.g. "sitemap2.xml", etc.) should it be necessary to

generate a sitemap index ("sitemap_index.xml") as explained above.

2. To exclude any indexed URLs which are under a different domain (or base URL) to the location of the

sitemap file, as required by Google's Sitemap specifications.

With the default option "

Include only URLs within the Sitemap Base URL

" selected, the latter requirement

is enforced to obey Google requirements for sitemap files to only contain URLs which are

below

the base

URL of the sitemap file. For example, you can not normally have a URL such as "http://

www.myotherdomain.com/mypage.html" included in a sitemap file located at "http://www.mysite.com/

sitemap.xml".

However, new Google rules make an exception for this when your multiple domains/sites have been

verified with Google. In this case, you can submit a sitemap file containing URLs to multiple domains

(known as "cross submits"). To create a sitemap for "cross submits" in Zoom, you should select the

option to "

Include all indexed URLs

". Find out more about verifying your sites with Google here:

http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=35179

Note: When "

Include only URLs within the Sitemap Base URL

" is selected, Zoom

will automatically exclude any URLs from your XML sitemap if it is not within the

specified Sitemap Base URL, even though that URL may have been indexed (or it

may be a recommended link). This means that your XML sitemap may not contain

all the URLs indexed if this is setup incorrectly or if you are indexing with multiple

base URLs. See "Uploading your XML sitemap files" below for more information.

By default, each XML sitemap file will contain the URL and the last modified date of the pages that were

found on your website. There are also the following options available:

Use ZOOMPAGEBOOST values for Priority field in sitemap (XML only)

By selecting this option, the XML sitemap file(s) will also contain a priority value (from 0.0 to 1.0) which

indicates the importance of a page, relative to the rest of your website. It will determine this value based

on the ZOOMPAGEBOOST meta tag which is also used for prioritizing pages within Zoom's index (see

"Weightings (Page Boosting)" for more information).

The default priority is 0.5, for any page where this attribute is not specified. These values will correspond

to the ZOOMPAGEBOOST value (where a -5 page boost is equivalent to 0.0 priority, 0 page boost is 0.5

priority, and +5 page boost is 1.0 priority).

Zoom Search Engine56

Uploading your sitemap files

The sitemap files can also be automatically uploaded at the end of indexing, along with your search files.

You will need to enable this option on the Sitemaps tab and the "Automatically upload files at the end of

indexing" option on the FTP tab of the Configuration window.

You could also upload your sitemap files manually using a third party FTP client if you prefer.

Notes on uploading Google XML Sitemap files

You may need to specify a different folder or path on the server for your sitemap files, as the Google

Sitemap protocol requires the files to be located at the base URL of the files which have been scanned.

This means that if your sitemap files contain URLs such as:

http://www.mysite.com/index.html

http://www.mysite.com/story/page1.html

http://www.mysite.com/news/archive/test.html

Then your sitemap files must be hosted at the common base URL of the above files, and that is the root

directory at http://www.mysite.com/

However, if your sitemap only contains URLs such as:

http://www.mysite.com/news/index.html

http://www.mysite.com/news/page1.html

http://www.mysite.com/news/archive/test.html

Then you should have your sitemap files hosted at: http://www.mysite.com/news/ and this should be your Sitemap Base URL.

Note: the folder/path specified in this window should either be a path which is relative to

your home directory (eg. "public_html/news/") or an absolute path on the server (eg. "/usr/

home/myaccount/public_html/news/"). The folder path should NOT be a URL and should

NOT start with "http://".

For more information on the Google Sitemap protocol requirements of the location of your sitemap files,

please visit their webpage here:

https://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/docs/en/protocol.html#sitemapLocation

Tip: Submitting your XML sitemap to search engines

If you anticipate that your website will not grow any larger than 50,000 pages, you can

simply submit the URL to your "sitemap.xml" file to Google or other search engines using the

Google Sitemap protocol format. However, if you anticipate your website growing larger than

50,000 pages at some point, we would recommend submitting the URL to your

"sitemap_index.xml" page instead. This would allow your submission to stay valid even when

your website grows beyond this limit, and you need to have more individual sitemap files in

order to list your entire website.

2.2.17 Synonyms

This feature allows you to specify synonyms, variations of words, common misspellings, etc. and allow

you to map them to an equivalent word in the index. This can be very helpful if many users on your site

are searching for names which are different to the ones you used on your website, but have the same

meaning.

Indexing your website 57

For example, the word “question” could be made equivalent to “inquiry,enquiry,query,questions”, so that

when a user searches for any of the aforementioned words, they would get the same results.

A synonym definition has two fields:

1. Word: This is the word that the synonyms will be mapped to.

It must be a word that actually

appears in the content of your website

2. Synonyms: This is a list of words separated by commas that will be considered equivalent to the

indexed word. When a user searches for any of these words, they will get the same search results

as if they searched for the indexed word. All occurrences of the words in this synonym list will also

appear as a search result when you search for the indexed word.

You will need to re-index your website for any new synonyms to take effect.

Note: When a word is synonymous with another word, it is implied that they are

equivalent both ways. For example, if an entry for “cat” has a synonym “feline”, then

“feline” is also considered the same as “cat”. You do not need to specify another

synonym entry to define this.

You can also Import and Export your list of synonyms to and from a text file. This should be a text file

containing a synonym entry per line, in the form of:

word=synonym1,synonym2,synonym3, etc...

You can create this text file in any text editor (such as Notepad). An example text file which can be

imported into the Synonyms list would be as follows:

question=inquiry,enquiry,query

problem=trouble,issue,bug,help

rat=mouse,mice

dog=puppies,puppy,canine,dawg

Note that you can only have single word synonyms, and not synonyms for phrases.

Zoom will expect this text file to be in the same encoding or charset as specified on the "Languages"

panel. So if "Unicode (UTF-8)" is selected here, the file would be expected to be in UTF-8 encoding. Only

the encodings available on the Languages panel are supported.

2.2.18 Recommended links

This feature allows you to specify a list of keywords or phrases that you can associate with specific URLs.

When a user does a search for a matching word or phrase, these recommended results will then appear

before the rest of the search results like so:

Zoom Search Engine58

These recommended links will not only appear above all other results, but they can also be customised to

stand out from the other search results. By using new style sheets classes it will, for example, be possible

to make these results appear in bold or be highlighted with a different background colour (as seen

above). You can also configure them to appear in the same manner as normal results (by appearing

before any other search results).

The Recommended Links feature allows a wealth of new possibilities. It means you can effectively

override the current #1 'organic' result with a result of your own choosing.

Some examples of use could include,

· Directing people to the right product home page based on product number.

· Selling search results positions on your web site. Doing this would provide new income streams for

sites that choose to do this. How much if the #1 search position worth on your sites search engine?

· Directing people to your most profitable products

You can manage your list of recommended links from the Configuration window (under the

"Recommended links" tab).

Indexing your website 59

You can specify the maximum number of recommended links to display per search, with 3 links being the

default maximum. It is also possible to have multiple recommendations for the same word and control

the priority by adjusting the order of the rows in the list above.

Note that each recommended link must have a keyword (or key phrase), URL, and a title. The description

field is optional and limited to 300 characters per recommended link. The keyword for the recommended

link may contain wildcards (e.g. "*" or "?") so if you create a recommended link for the keyword "drive*"

it will appear when searching for "driver", "drives", etc.

You can also import and export a large collection of recommended links from/to a text file by clicking on

the "Import" and "Export" button respectively.

Tip: Recommended links will match against the full search query, so a search for

'text box' (ie.

without

quotation marks) will also return the recommended links

entered for the word/phrase:

text box

. Note that some characters (such as

brackets and other punctuation characters) and spaces may be stripped or

trimmed from your keyword or phrase. This is so that the phrase will match the

search query (which will also have such characters stripped or trimmed).

The following are some examples of recommended link entries, and an explanation of search queries that

will yield its return:

Example 1

Zoom Search Engine60

Word:

help

URL:

http://www.zoomsearchengine.com/zoom/support/

Title:

Technical support and help for Zoom

Description:

Support, FAQs, and more

The above recommended link will appear for any search queries containing the single word

help

However, it will not return for a search containing an exact phrase (assuming exact phrase functionality is

enabled, and the query uses double quote characters) such as

"help file"

Example 2

Word:

help file

URL:

http://www.zoomsearchengine.com/zoom/

usersguide.html

Title:

Users Guide

Description:

Comprehensive users guide to Zoom

The above recommended link will appear for a search query containing the exact phrase

"help file"

, but it

will not return in a search for the single word

help

. It will however, also return for the two word search

query

help file

(ie. without quotation marks).

Importing and Exporting Recommended Links

If you have a large list of recommended links to add or maintain, you can import them from a text file

created by any text editor. The file needs to be pipe separated (the pipe is the vertical '|' character), with

a recommended link entry per line. For example:

Keyword1|http://www.url1.com/|Page title|This is the page description

Keyword2|http://www.url2.com/|Another Page title|This is the page description for the 2nd page

You can also export an existing list of recommended links to a text file of this same format. This way you

can maintain them outside of Zoom if need be, and/or import them back in to other ZCFG files.

2.2.19 Index log

You can configure the type of messages that are displayed in the main status log window during an

indexing session here. This allows you to configure Zoom to only log certain messages types as

necessary, which can be useful if you wish to minimize the messages produced so it's easier to filter

through.

Log modes

There are two main logging modes.

"Basic" omits the following message types:

Skipped

Filtered

Spidering, Thread info, Initialization

. When

this mode is selected, these messages will not be recorded and you will not be able to toggle them on or

off from the "Log" window.

"Detailed" enables and logs all message types. Note that you can still filter them on-the-fly on the "Log"

tab window.

Indexing your website 61

Log HTML warnings

When this option is disabled, warning messages regarding invalid HTML code will be suppressed (e.g.

"Suspected invalid HTML ...", etc.). Note that HTML warning messages are important to help you find

broken HTML code, and also to be alerted to why certain pages may not have been indexed correctly. If

you cannot find the cause of the "invalid HTML" warning messages, you should try running the web page

in question through a HTML validator such as http://validator.w3.org/

Log to file

You can ask Zoom to write the contents of the index log window to a file, allowing you to archive or view

the log at a later date with any text editor.

To enable this, check the "Save index log to file" option and specify the filename and path of the file

which the index log will be written to.

The "Debug mode" option is used to help resolve crash issues and other situations where you will need

the log file to be written to disk per line entry. It will also enable additional debugging information to be

displayed in the index log.

2.2.20 Advanced

Do not show wizard on startup

Stop the wizard from being displayed when Zoom is started.

Beep at the end of indexing

Play the system alert sound when indexing completes.

Search logging

This option is not available when the Javascript platform is selected. This is due to the fact that Javascript

is a client-side scripting language and logging of user searches is not possible.

This enables search word logging so that searches made on your website will be recorded into a server-

side log file. Note that you will have to specify the filename and path of the location of the log file on the

server-side relative to the location where you will place the search script.

Note: You will need to be able to change server-side file permissions to allow

write access to the log file you specify. We recommend this option to more

advanced users familiar with server side file permissions only. Note that many

cheaper web-hosting services do not allow you to change your file permissions, so

consult your web hosting company regarding this beforehand. This can normally be

done via your FTP client or through a Unix shell account by using the "chmod"

command. For more help and information on setting up your server-side

permissions for logging, please refer to our online FAQ:

http://www.zoomsearchengine.com/zoom/support/logging.html

Logged search results contain, the date (YYYY-MM-DD), the time, the IP address of the user, the search

query, and the search options used. The following is an example of a log file record (on one line).

Zoom Search Engine62

2004-03-05, 09:52:08, 127.0.0.1, "test search query", Matches = 6, OR, PerPage = 10,

PageNum = 0, No cats, Time = 0.084, Rec = 0

This file can be analysed independently or with the statistics report generator (see "Search Statistics

Report" for more information). Since the log file is in CSV format, you could also import the file directly

into Excel.

Note to CGI users: if you are hosting on an Apache server (in a “cgi-bin”

directory), remember that most Apache servers do not allow text files to be

accessed via HTTP from the cgi-bin directory. This means that if you store your log

file in “/cgi-bin/logs/”, you will not be able to access this file via HTTP using your

browser or Zoom’s Statistics Report tool – instead, you will only be able to

download the file with FTP and analyse it locally. Alternatively, make sure you

specify a log file path outside of the “cgi-bin” directory.

Custom script source path

If you wish to use a copy of the search script (search.asp, search.php or search.js) that is located in

a different folder besides the one in the Zoom installation directory, then you can change the path here.

This is only necessary if you are making modifications to the search script source code, and you wish to

maintain multiple versions to be used with different sites.

Embedding script

This option allows you to specify the URL used to link back to the search script. By default, it should be

left blank.

However, if you wish to embed the search script in your own server-side scripts (eg. you have included

search.php into your own PHP file, or included the CGI within a PHP script, etc.) you can then specify the

filename of your embedded script here so that it will link to the correct file.

Spider User-Agent (Enterprise Edition only)

Users of the Enterprise Edition of Zoom can modify the User-Agent text that is used to identify the spider

when it crawls web servers. By default, the spider identifies itself as "ZoomSpider -

zoomsearchengine.com [ZSEBOT]".

If you specify a name here, e.g. "mysearchengine.com", your spider will then identify itself as

"mysearchengine.com [ZSEBOT]". This allows you to include your website name or other contact

information, should you wish to allow third-party websites to identify you, or be able to contact you if

required. It can also be helpful if you wish to add specialized behaviour to your website, so that, for

example, you could allow your personal spider exclusive access to certain pages on your site, and prohibit

access for any other user-agents.

Disable charset enforcing on search script

This option disables the search script’s attempt at specifying the charset via a HTTP header. This is done

to ensure that the corresponding character set used for the encoding of the index data, is also used for

the search page. However, if you are an advanced user trying to embed the search script within your own

scripted pages, this extra HTTP header may not be required (as you may already have HTTP output

before the search script is executed). In this case, you can safely disable this feature here.

Indexing your website 63

XML/RSS output (CGI only)

The CGI version can now return search results in XML/RSS format. Selecting this checkbox will enable

the XML output as default, and clicking "Configure" will allow you to specify some XML specific settings.

See "XML/RSS output" for more information.

2.2.21 Custom Meta Search Fields

Clicking on this tab will bring up the Custom Meta Fields manager. See the following "Custom Meta

Search Fields" section for more information.

2.3 Step-by-step Wizard

When you start Zoom Indexer for the first time, you will be greeted with a Wizard which can guide you

through the basics of setting up a search engine. This aims to help new users familiarize themselves with

the indexing procedure. It also provides an alternative for veteran users to get something up and running

quickly.

The Wizard will guide you through the main choices involved in setting up the indexer for your website/

intranet, or CD/DVD distribution. Click on “Help” if you are stuck at any point or are unsure of what to do.

You can also “Cancel” at any point and make your own configuration changes directly, as instructed in the

following chapters. You can re-start the Wizard by clicking on the Magic Wand in the toolbar or by clicking

on the “Tools” menu and selecting “Run Wizard”.

If you do not want the Wizard to be displayed when you next start Zoom, tick the

Do not show Wizard on

startup

check box.

Zoom Search Engine64

For an introductory overview of Zoom, please see the "Overview" chapter.

2.3.1 Select file types step

Here you can select the file types you wish to include in your search functions. Note that you can specify

exact file extensions and more options in the Configuration window under the "Scan options" tab.

Also, some file formats are only accessible with plugins installed. For more information on plugins and

the file extensions supported, see "Plugins".

2.3.2 Output folder and limit step

Zoom will create a set of index files, which will be required for your search function. Specify a folder here

for Zoom to create these files in. This can be a temporary folder of your convenience, or a folder under

your local copy of your website.

For users of the Professional Edition (or above), you can also specify a limit for the maximum number of

pages to index. More limits can be changed in the Configuration window, under the "Limits" tab.

Start indexing immediately

This is the default option and will attempt to index your site as soon as you click Finish for the wizard.

Do not start indexing

Select this option if you have more configuration changes or settings that you would like to make, and

would like to start indexing at your own convenience.

2.4 FTP

Zoom provides built-in FTP (File Transfer Protocol) capabilities so that it can upload the files required for

your search function directly to your web site.

Indexing your website 65

FTP server

Specify the FTP site address of your server, eg. “ftp.myserver.com”. You can also specify the port

number (default is 21 for FTP).

You can specify PASV (Passive FTP) mode if you have trouble connecting to your FTP server because of

your firewall.

Username and Password

Specify the login information to your FTP account.

Use PASV mode

This enables passive mode which may be required by some FTP servers. In this mode, the client

establishes both the command channel and the data channel.

Use SFTP

This connects to the server by SFTP (SSH File Transfer Protocol) for more security than plain FTP. Make

sure your server supports SFTP when using this feature. Note the difference to FTPS below.

Use FTPS (SSL/TLS)

This connects to the server by FTPS (FTP using TLS/SSL) for more security than plain FTP. Make sure

your server supports FTPS when using this feature. Note the difference to SFTP above.

Zoom Search Engine66

Folder or path on server

This should be the relative or absolute path on your FTP server where the files are to be uploaded to.

Note that the folder must already exist. Check with your web host (or use a full browsing capable FTP

client) to confirm the correct path if you are not sure. Typically, it may be something like “public_html/

search” or “www/search” if you wish to put it in a “search” folder underneath the main site address. If

you wish to upload the files to the default current directory upon logging in, specify “./” as the path here.

Automatically upload files at the end of indexing

This option is only accessible from the Configuration window (under the “FTP” tab).

When enabled, Zoom will automatically attempt to upload your files every time you finish indexing. We

recommend you only use this when you have confirmed that your FTP settings are correct, and that the

files are uploaded to the correct folder or path.

This option is particularly useful for scheduled indexing, allowing you to configure Zoom to update your

website without any user interaction, and on an automated, regular basis.

Do not upload search template

This option is only accessible from the Configuration window (under the “FTP” tab).

When checked, Zoom will not upload the search template file, assuming that you already have one on the

server. This can be useful if you have some server-side changes that need to be made (or the template

file is dynamically generated) and you do not wish Zoom to overwrite the file on the server.

Upload with .tmp filenames and rename when completed

This option is only accessible from the Configuration window (under the “FTP” tab).

When checked, Zoom will upload your search files with a ".tmp" extension so as not to overwrite your

existing index files during the upload process. It will then only rename the files from the ".tmp" extension

to its proper file extensions (and thus overwriting our existing index) when all files have been successfully

uploaded. This minimizes the time which your search function would be unavailable while the old index

files are being updated.

Set execute file permission after uploading

This option is only accessible from the Configuration window (under the “FTP” tab).

This option will set execute file permission on "search.cgi" via FTP, after the files have been uploaded.

Execute permissions are required for the CGI search option only. Some servers (such as Windows-based

FTP servers) do not allow you to change file permissions remotely via FTP. For such servers, we would

recommend disabling this option and setting the file permissions manually. See "Additional notes for

uploading CGI" for more details and instructions on how to do this.

2.5 Categories

This allows you to specify categories in your search engine, allowing your users to select from a drop-

down to restrict searches to certain sections of your site. Each search result will also be tagged to

Indexing your website 67

indicate the category that they belong to. Searching with the “All” category will return results belonging to

any of the categories.

To enable categories support, open the Configuration window and select the "Categories" tab. This will

bring up the categories management list, where you can add, remove, and edit the categories.

Zoom Search Engine68

Adding, editing and removing categories

When creating or editing a category, you have the following fields to specify:

1. Category name: The name of the category must be unique. These category names will be listed in

the drop-down box of the search page, or as check boxes if you have "

Allow searching in multiple

See also:

File formats supported

Installing a plugin

Using the plugins

Configuring a plugin

Zoom Search Engine98

Upgrading a plugin

Using custom description (.desc) files

2.18.1 File formats supported

We currently provide plugin support to allow for indexing and searching of the following file formats:

Extension

File type

.PDF

Acrobat document

.DOC

.DOT

Word document

.PPT

PowerPoint presentations

.XLS

Excel spreadsheets

.WPD

WordPerfect document

.SWF

Shockwave Flash animation

.RTF

Rich Text Format document

.DJVU

DjVu documents

.JPG

.JPEG

.GIF

.PNG

.TIFF

.TIF

Image files

(see "Image indexing")

.MP3

MP3 audio file

.DWF

AutoCAD DWF file

.ZIP

ZIP compressed archive

(See "ZIP file support")

Please visit our Plugins website for download links and a more up to date list of supported file formats:

http://www.zoomsearchengine.com/zoom/plugins.html

2.18.2 Unsupported binary formats

There are some binary file formats which are recognized by Zoom but there is no plugin available to

extract content or meta data. For example, ".exe" and ".zip" files do not contain much meaningful

searchable meta data, so a plugin would not serve much purpose. Other file formats may contain meta

data but we simply do not have a plugin available to extract this at this point.

For the file extensions in the following list, you can still add them on the "Scan options" tab, and provided

you have "Filename" enabled for indexing (see "Indexing options"), Zoom will index these files so that you

can search for them by filename (eg. a search for "*.exe" will return all executable files on your

website).

You will also have the option to use description (.desc) files for these file types, so that you can specify

titles, meta descriptions and meta keywords to these files on a file-by-file basis. See "Using custom

description (.desc) files" for more information.

Extension

File type

.EXE

Executable file

.WMV

Windows Media Video

.MPG

MPEG video

.AVI

AVI video

.TAR

Compressed archive

Indexing your website 99

.GZ

.CAB

.RAR

.DGN

Vector image format

2.18.3 Installing a plugin

Download the plugin required from the Zoom website.

To install an individual plugin, unzip the file downloaded to the "plugins" folder found within the Zoom

Program Data directory (see "Where is the Program Data directory?").

Once you have done this, you will need to restart Zoom Indexer. When you start Zoom Indexer, click on

the "Log" tab where you should see a message in the window that indicates the plugin has been found

and the file extension is now enabled. You can now add the file extension to your "Scan Options" panel on

the "Configure" tab and index this file format.

If there is no indication that the plugin was found on the "Log" tab of the Indexer upon startup of the

application, then your plugins were installed in the wrong folder. Double check the above instructions and

try again.

2.18.4 Using the plugins

Once the plugin is installed, all you have to do is open the Configure dialog window, and add the file

extension supported to the extension list. For example, “.doc” for Word document support. Click OK and

start indexing.

2.18.5 Configuring a plugin

You can configure the behaviour of a plugin by double-clicking on the file extension (or selecting the

extension and clicking the "Configure" button) in the "Scan options" tab of the Configuration window.

Each plugin may vary as to what options are available. The following are a list of options that are

available for some plugins:

Use description (.desc) files

Enabling this option allows Zoom to look for custom description (.desc) files for this file extension/plugin.

See "Using custom description (.desc) files" for more information.

Image and thumbnail options

Clicking on "Configure images" allow you to setup icons or thumbnails for this file extension/plugin type.

See "Icons and thumbnails" for more information.

Retrieve internal meta information

This option extracts Meta information (where available) from the plugin supported files. For example, this

may include Author, Subject, and Keywords from PDF files.

Retrieve technical data when available

Zoom Search Engine100

This option will extract technical data (when available) from this file type. For example, this may include

camera brand, level of exposure, and other data which may be available within an image file format.

Scan Method (PDF only)

This option allows you to utilize alternative methods of extracting the text content from PDF files. Due to

the technical limitations of the PDF file format, the textual content stored within a PDF file can be

ambiguous in its order of presentation. For example, text may be split up in several columns, but this may

not be defined within the PDF file itself as to when a sentence ends and when it wraps around. It is only

structured visually.

For some PDF files (it depends on how they were created), the default scan method ("presentation

layout") may not be the best at preserving the order of text as intended, and in such situations, you

should try the other two methods available: "raw formatting order", and "text layer".

Use password (PDF only)

This allows you to specify the owner password to be used for extracting content from PDF documents

which have password security enabled.

Highlight and locate within PDF documents (PDF only)

This feature will allow searched words to appear highlighted within Acrobat Reader when you click on a

PDF document in the list of search results. Acrobat Reader will also scroll and locate the first occurrence

of the word. This feature will only work for Acrobat Reader 7.0 or later.

Note that this feature is dependent on the capabilities of the Acrobat Reader application which does not

currently support exact phrase matching and substring matching. This means that it may highlight some

words which were not the ones specifically found or matched by Zoom in such cases.

2.18.6 Upgrading a plugin

As new versions of the plugins become available on the website, simply copy them into the same

“plugins” directory that they were installed to (see "Installing a plugin"), making sure to allow it to

overwrite the old plugin files.

2.18.7 Using custom description (.desc) files

As many external binary documents do not contain useful title and description information, Zoom allows

you to specify custom Meta information for any plugin supported files. The option can be enabled in the

indexer configuration dialog and must be enabled for each plugin (see "Configuring a plugin"). Once it is

enabled, the indexer will look for .desc files for this plugin supported file extension.

For example, if you have a file called “mydocument.doc”, you can create a text file called

“mydocument.doc.desc” in the same directory with the following contents:

<title>This is my document custom title</title>

Zoom will then index the words found within “mydocument.doc”, but use the title and description

information found in “mydocument.doc.desc” – so that you will see your custom title and description in

your search results.

Indexing your website 101

You can also specify other meta information in .desc files, including extra keywords with the

ZOOMWORDS or KEYWORDS fields (see "Manually add words to the index"); ZOOMPAGEBOOST options

(see "Weightings"), as well as Last-Modified date information (see "Specifying a last-modified date for

your web pages").

2.18.8 ZIP file support

ZIP file support is built into the Indexer. This means that it is different to the other file extensions listed on

the "File formats supported" page, as it does not require a plugin to be installed. However, like the plugin

support, it is not available in the Free Edition and you will need a registered edition of Zoom to index ZIP

files.

There are two available methods of indexing ZIP files. You can configure between them by double-clicking

on the ".zip" file extension on the "Scan Options" tab of the Configuration panel.

Extract and index all files inside ZIP archive

When this method is selected, ZIP files will be uncompressed and each file stored within the ZIP archive

will be individually indexed. This means that if you have one ZIP file containing 20 HTML files, Zoom will

index 20 files, with each of the HTML pages indexed as separate pages.

Note that while search results will treat each of these files separately, there is no universally acceptable

way to directly link to a file within a ZIP. So what you will see in your search results is a list of various

pages (with their matching page titles, etc.) but they may all in fact link to the same ZIP file if these

pages were all extracted from one ZIP file.

Note that ZIP files found within a ZIP archive will not be indexed.

Below is an example of a ZIP file search result with the "extract and index all files inside ZIP archive"

option enabled. In this example, all 3 files returned are in fact from one single ZIP file and they all link to

the same result with "#<filename>" at the end of the URL.

Only index filename of ZIP archive

Zoom Search Engine102

By selecting this indexing method, your ZIP files will not be uncompressed, and their contents will be

ignored. Only the filename will be indexed, and any meta data provided via a .desc file will be used (if the

"Use description (.desc) files" option is selected).

Server-side search engine

(Using PHP, ASP, or CGI)

Part

Zoom Search Engine104

3 Server-side search engine (Using PHP, ASP, or CGI)

When to use

· When your web server supports PHP or ASP, or has CGI execute permission

· When you do not intend to run the search engine without a web server.

· When you have a large set of data (eg. over 20,000 pages)

How it works

· Requires PHP or ASP support on your web server (or CGI execute permission)

· Processes search queries on the web server

· Performance does not depend on the users’ web browser or computer

· Index data is stored on the server, minimal Internet traffic.

(1) Only the search results need to be sent to the user.

(2) The search query is processed on the server.

(3) The index data files (containing the keywords, and other search data) stay on the web server and

does not need to be downloaded.

See also:

Files required

Using the CGI or PHP version without a web server

3.1 Files required

The following is a list of files required to install a server-side search engine on your website. They will

be created in the Output directory (that you specify before indexing) by the Zoom Indexer, after it has

successfully scanned and indexed your website.

Server-side search engine (Using PHP, ASP, or CGI) 105

Filename

Purpose

Notes

search.php OR

search.asp OR

search.cgi

Search script / search page

This is the main search page.

Open this file in your browser to

access the search page.

settings.php OR

settings.asp OR

settings.zdat

Settings file

This file defines the settings for

the search engine.

search_template.html

Search template

This is a template file that defines

the appearance of the search

page. See “How do I customize

my search page?” for more

information.

If this file does not already exist in

the output directory, a default

template is created.

zoom_dictionary.zdat

zoom_wordmap.zdat

zoom_pageinfo.zdat

zoom_pagedata.zdat

Search index data files

Data files

zoom_pagetext.zdat

Context descriptions data

file

Data file

This file is only created in the

output directory if context

descriptions are enabled.

zoom_recommended.zdat

See also:

Files required for Javascript

Limitations of Javascript

4.1 Files required

Note that all files required will be created in the Output Directory at the end of indexing.

Filename

Purpose

Notes

search.html

Search page / search

template

This is the file to open in your

browser to access the search page.

You can also customize the

appearance of the search page by

modifying this file (see “How do I

customize my search page?” for

more information.).

If this file does not already exists in

the output directory, a default

template is created.

search.js

Search script

This file contains the core

functionality of the searching

process.

settings.js

Settings file

This file defines the settings for the

search engine.

zoom_index.js

Search index data file

Data file

zoom_pageinfo.js

Pages index data file

Data file

4.2 Limitations of Javascript

While Javascript has the advantage of having no server-side requirements, it does have some significant

disadvantages due to the fact that it is a relatively basic, browser scripting language.

· Capacity: The amount of resources (both memory, and CPU) made available to the script interpreter

is often very limited. As such, it can not deal with large volumes of data in memory and can only handle

around 5 MB of indexed data (that is, the generated .js files can total around 5 MB in size), which may

be approximately around 50 MB of site content. Your mileage may vary depending on the browser you

are using.

· Performance and functionality: Due to the fact that the script runs inside a browser, more intricate

processing methods are restricted, making it unfeasible to implement certain features (listed below).

Search features not available in the Javascript version are:

· Context descriptions

Zoom Search Engine112

· Exact phrase matching

· Spelling Suggestions

· Search word logging

Note that all of the above features are available with the server-side search options available: PHP, ASP,

and CGI (see "Server-side search engine"). If you wish to publish your search function without a web

server, but require the features available in the server-side search options, take a look at “Using the CGI

or PHP version without a web server”.

4.3 Using the CGI or PHP version without a web server

While Javascript is a good solution for distributing small sites on CD it is limited in what it can do. Most

notably, the Javascript version can not handle large volumes of data and struggles with sites of up to

100,000+ (this can depend on the browser used).

The CGI version can handle much greater volumes of data, and also offers additional functionalities such

as exact phrase searching and "Google-like" context search results.

The solutions below apply to CD's, DVD's, USB drives and memory sticks. The process is the same in

each case despite the media being different. Each of these options require the Zoom Search Engine.

Tip: You can find a solution comparison table (and more information) on our online

support page for this topic here:

http://www.zoomsearchengine.com/zoom/support/faq_CD_search.html

The available options are as follows:

Use our FlyingAnt web server on a CD with the CGI option

FlyingAnt is a product we have developed that allows you to run CGI's directly off a CD/DVD. It is the most

powerful and flexible solution of the ones listed here, allowing you to create a CD with all the search

capabilities available in Zoom and your CD will work for all browsers, as well as cross-platform support

for your audience on Windows, Mac OSX, and most Linux distributions.

See the FlyingAnt website for more information: http://www.zoomsearchengine.com/flyingant/index.html

Use the Zoom Javascript option to fully run the search in a browser

This is default Javascript option described in the rest of this chapter. It is the least capable due to the

technical limitations of the JavaScript platform, but the most convenient. It requires no additional

software or setup, and will run in any modern web browser.

Use third party IE plugin DLL to use the ASP scripting language on a CD.

There are third party solutions available to running ASP scripts on a CD. These include packages such as

the HSP (HTML Scripting Pages). You may prefer this option if you have other ASP scripts that you wish to

serve on the CD along with Zoom. For more information, visit our online support page here: http://

www.zoomsearchengine.com/zoom/support/aspcd.html

Use third party webserver software to use the PHP or CGI scripting language on a

CD.

Client-side search engine (Using JavaScript) 113

There are third party solutions available to running PHP scripts on a CD. These include packages such as

Server2Go. You may prefer htis option if you have other PHP scripts that you wish to serve on the CD

along with Zoom. For more information, visit our online support page here: http://

www.zoomsearchengine.com/zoom/support/cgicd.html

Use our free Zoom Front End software on a CD with the CGI option.

For advanced software developers, we provide a sample C/C++ project with source code to demonstrate

how to use the CGI within a C/C++ application and execute this off a CD-ROM or DVD-ROM without any

web server.

The project also comes with a compiled sample Front End for Windows. You can take the binary Front

End application and use this in your distribution, or modify the source code and compile your own Front

End application.

Due to the technical nature of the project files, we would recommend this option only for more

experienced programmers. For more information, and download links, visit the web page here: http://

www.zoomsearchengine.com/zoom/support/cgifrontend.html

Publishing your search

engine on your website or

CD-ROM

Part

Publishing your search engine on your website or CD-ROM 115

5 Publishing your search engine on your website or

CD-ROM

5.1 What to do after indexing

Once you have indexed your website, you will need to upload or copy the files created by the Indexer to

your web-server or DVD/USB distribution.

Note: If you have selected a server-side platform (such as PHP, ASP, ASP.NET or

CGI), your search files will not work until they are uploaded to a server with the

appropriate scripting or application support. For example, you cannot test the PHP

search page on your offline desktop computer (it will show up as script code). You

need to upload or copy the files to a web server with PHP support to allow it to

execute. A client-side platform (e.g. JavaScript) however, can be tested/executed

on your local computer without needing to be uploaded to a web server.

The list of files required are given in the window that pops up after indexing (shown below).

These files are created in the Output directory you specified. Note that the list includes all the files you

will need on your website for your search engine to run.

Here you can select from two options to continue with, by default, Zoom can upload the files to your

website. If this option is selected, Zoom will open the FTP upload window when you click OK, and prompt

you for FTP information.

If you would like to upload the files yourself (or you do not need to upload the files because you are

indexing a site for a DVD/USB distribution or an Intranet, etc.), select “Do not upload the files” and click

OK.

See also:

Uploading to your website

CD-ROM distribution

Zoom Search Engine116

5.2 Uploading to your website

You will need to upload the files listed under “Required Files” to your web server. You can either use

Zoom to upload the files (see "Upload files to server (FTP)"), or you can use your preferred FTP client. If

you choose to use an external FTP client, make sure that the files are uploaded in binary mode and NOT

text mode.

Also, make sure that all the files listed are uploaded to the same directory, and to remove or overwrite

any files on your web-server from previous indexing sessions.

5.3 USB distribution

If you are putting your search engine on a USB stick (Javascript platform only), you should copy the

Required Files listed to where your USB content is.

Note that, if you are using relative paths for your base URL, it will be important where you copy these

files to make sure that the search result links will still work. For instance, if you specified a base URL of

“./” then your search files should be placed on the same directory level as where your USB content is.

Refer to the Appendix chapter, "Base URL for USB distribution", for more information on relative and

absolute paths.

5.4 Additional notes for uploading CGI

If you are using the CGI version, note that many web servers are set up to only execute CGI from a

certain directory in your web account.

For Apache servers, this would usually be a directory named “cgi-bin”. Check with your web host for

more details, and upload your files to the appropriate directory.

For IIS servers, you may need to enable “Execute permissions” for “Scripts and Executables” on your

selected hosting folder. You can do this from the IIS Control Panel, right clicking on the folder, and

selecting “Properties”.

Once your files are uploaded to the web server, you must also set execute permissions on the file

“search.cgi”, and public read permissions on the other files (all the .zdat files and the search template

HTML file). This can be done via your FTP client or through a Unix shell account by using the “chmod 755

<filename>” command.

Tip: Zoom can be configured to set execute permissions for the "search.cgi" file

automatically via FTP, immediately after uploading the files. This option can be

found on the FTP tab of the Configuration window. See "Set execute file

permission after uploading" for more information. Note that this option may not

work on some servers where remote file permission changes are not allowed.

5.5 Where is my search page?

Once you have uploaded or copied the required files across to your server, you can open the following file

in your browser to access the search page:

· search.php (for PHP)

· search.asp (for ASP)

Publishing your search engine on your website or CD-ROM 117

· search.html (for Javascript)

· search.cgi (for CGI)

You should create links elsewhere on your website to the appropriate search page. Alternatively, you can

create a search form on your website which passes the query to one of the above mentioned scripts. See

"How do I add a search form" for more information.

How do I customize the look

of my search page?

Part

How do I customize the look of my search page? 119

6 How do I customize the look of my search page?

You can completely alter the appearance of the search page, from changing the fonts and layout to

including headers, footers or site navigation menus.

The following is a screenshot of how your search page will look by default after indexing and uploading

(before any customisations have been made).

First, you will need to have indexed your site successfully. If so, a default search template file should

have been created in the output directory (alongside the index files). This is a normal HTML file that can

be edited like any other ordinary web page with your favourite web page editor.

Note: the search template file is named “search_template.html” for the PHP, ASP,

and CGI versions. For the Javascript version, it is named “search.html”.

You can also open this file from the Indexer, by clicking on the “Templates” menu, and selecting

“Customize search page appearance”.

This will open up the HTML search template in your default HTML editor. Alternatively you can select a

different editor to modify the template with.

Note that you should not use MS Word to edit the template

Zoom Search Engine120

file due to known problems with Word’s support for HTML editing*

(see “Changing your default editor for

templates”).

You can modify this page as you see fit, however, you must retain the following "tag" in place of where

you want the search function to be displayed:

This is different for the JavaScript version, which uses the following line instead:

If you need to go back to the default search template, you can delete or rename your search template

file, and re-index your site. A new “default template” will be created in the output directory at the end of

indexing, when it finds that the search template is missing.

To change the fonts, colours, and appearance of your search results (everything after the search form),

edit the CSS styles defined at the top of the template HTML file. These styles are listed in "CSS class

listing".

If you are not familiar with CSS (Cascading Style Sheets), you can look up more

information on attributes and definitions you can use to alter everything from margins,

font sizes, background images, and more. There are many tutorials and websites online

(search for “CSS tutorial” on Google).

Just by changing this search template file, the appearance of your search page can be

completely changed. The following screenshot is an example of a customized search

page. See our website at http://www.zoomsearchengine.com/zoom/ for more examples

of search pages in the “Example sites” section.

Advanced template options

For more advanced users, who may wish to modify the layout of search results and/or the search form

outside of what is possible with CSS, they should refer to the "Advanced template options" section.

See also:

Customizing the search form

Customizing the search results

CSS class listing

6.1 Customizing the search form

The following are the class names used to define the style and appearance of the search form. (Note:

that this only applies to the search form generated by the script. You can also define your own search

form).

How do I customize the look of my search page? 121

6.2 Customizing the search results

The following are the class names used to define the style and appearance of the search results.

Zoom Search Engine122

There are some common CSS examples available (such as changing the colour of the highlighting, or the

fonts used for the search results, etc.) on our FAQ page here:

http://www.zoomsearchengine.com/zoom/support/css.html#examples

6.3 Customizing the recommended links

The following are the class names used to define the style and appearance of the search results.

You can specify the recommended links, titles and descriptions to appear here from the "Recommended

links" tab of the Configuration window.

6.4 CSS class listing

Style class

Description

.highlight

The appearance of the highlighted search words in the results, when

highlighting is enabled. For example,

.highlight { font-weight: bold; }

will make highlighted text bold (with no coloured background).

.searchheading

The appearance of the “Search results for…” heading

.summary

The appearance of the summary information for your search results (“129

results found on 2 pages”)

.suggestion

The appearance of text regarding spelling suggestions ("Did you mean...")

or search suggestions ("You may find more results ...")

.results

The appearance of the search result listing.

.category

The appearance of the category tag next to the result link, e.g. “[News

article]”

.cat_summary

The appearance of the category summary,

e.g. "Refine your search by category: News (3) Forum (13)"

.sorting

The appearance of the text links to switch between "Sort by relevance" and

"Sort by date" when sorting by date is enabled.

.result_title

The appearance of the title line (result number, page title/link, and

category name). Note that the link itself will be based on the styles defined

for hypertext links (ie. “a:link”, “a:visited”, “a:hover” and “a:active”).

.description

The appearance of the meta description or page description for a search

result.

How do I customize the look of my search page? 123

.context

The appearance of the contextual description. You can specify font, size,

etc. here. You can also specify margins and padding to make the context

indent from the main result link.

.infoline

The appearance of the small information line for each search result

(“Terms matched”, “Score”, and “URL”).

.zoom_searchform

The appearance of the overall search form. You can specify the overall font

you’d like to use for the text around the form, or give the form a border,

margin, or background. For example:

.zoom_searchform { font-size: 100%; border: dashed; border-

width: 1px; background: #DDDDDD;}

Will set a dashed border around the search form with a light grey

background.

.zoom_results_per_page

The appearance of the "Results per page" drop-down box.

.zoom_match

The appearance of the "Match ... any search words / all search words"

option.

.zoom_categories

The appearance of the categories drop-down or checkbox list (only when

categories are enabled). See "Categories" for more information. The

following will set your category drop-down box to green with smaller fonts:

.zoom_categories { background: #00FF00; font-size: 70%}

When multiple categories are enabled, a checkbox list is used and you can

change the appearance of the list via the "ul" and "li" sub-items of this CSS

class. For example,

.zoom_categories ul { display: inline; margin: 0px; }

.zoom_categories li { display: inline; list-style-type: none;}

will set the multiple category checkbox list to be horizontal without list

bullets.

input.zoom_button

The appearance of the search button. You can change the colour of this

button or set it to an image. For example:

input.zoom_button { background-color: #008080; color: #FFFFFF;

}

input.zoom_searchbox

The appearance of the search box where a user enters their search query.

You can change the background colour, size, and font from here.

.result_image

The appearance of the image to be displayed alongside your search results

(see "Icons and thumbnails"). Note that this is the class wrapping around

the image itself. You can specify CSS for the img file itself via

".result_image img". For example:

.result_image img { margin: 10px; width:100px; border:0px;}

will set your images to a fixed width of 100 pixels (and automatically

determine the height) with no border and a 10 pixel margin. For more

examples, see "Customizing the appearance of your icons or thumbnails".

.result_block

The appearance of one row of the search result. You can use this to specify

lines between each search result entry, or an alternating background

corner etc. For example,

.result_block { border: 1px; margin: 15px; clear: left; }

will specify a 1 pixel wide border and 15 pixel margin around the search

result item (enclosing the titles, description, etc.). Note that you will need to

specify the same for .result_altblock if you want all of your result items to

have this appearance, or you can specify something different.

.result_altblock

The appearance of every alternating row of the search result (to

.result_block above). You can specify something different here to

.result_block and have alternating background colour changes for example,

like the following:

.result_block { background-color: #FFFFFF; }

.result_altblock { background-color: #AAAAAA; }

will specify every result item to have a white background, and every

second item to have a grey background.

Zoom Search Engine124

.result_pages

The appearance of the text links to the different pages of search results at

the bottom of the page ("Result Pages: 1 2 3 Next >>")

.result_pagescount

The appearance of the text at the top of the results displaying the number

of pages of results found ("10 pages of results")

.searchtime

The appearance of the "Search took x seconds" text displayed at the

bottom of the page (when enabled, see "Configuring search page")

.recommended

The appearance of the recommended links part of the page that appears at

the top of the search results (when "Recommended links" are enabled).

The following will show all recommended links in a green coloured box with

a dotted border on top and bottom:

.recommended

{

background: #DFFFBF;

border-top: 1px dotted #808080;

border-bottom: 1px dotted #808080;

margin-top: 15px;

margin-bottom: 15px;

}

.recommended_heading

The appearance of the heading text for 'Recommended links'.

.recommend_block

The appearance of one row/item of a recommended link (similar to

.result_block above, but this is for the recommended links).

.recommend_title

The appearance of the title text link for a recommended link (similar to

.result_title but for the recommended links).

.recommend_description

The appearance of the description for a recommended link (similar to

.result_description but for the recommended links).

.recommend_image

The appearance of the image to be displayed alongside a recommended

link. Note that this is the class wrapping around the image itself. To make

your recommended link images appear on the left side of the link, use the

following:

.recommend_image { float: left; display: block; }

You can specify CSS for the img file itself via ".result_image img". For

example:

.recommend_image img { margin: 10px; width:100px; border:0px;}

will set your images to a fixed width of 100 pixels (and automatically

determine the height) with no border and a 10 pixel margin. For more

examples, see "Customizing the appearance of your icons or thumbnails".

.recommend_infoline

The appearance of the information line for a recommended link (similar to

.result_infoline but for the recommended links).

Custom Meta Field CSS classes

The following classes are only needed for sites using Custom Meta Search Fields.

.result_custommeta

The appearance of one Custom Meta Field that are listed next to a

search result. This is the block that encloses the inline

"result_metaname_MYFIELD" and "result_metavalue_MYFIELD" tags.

Changing this allows you to specify how to space out the different

meta fields, whether they should appear on the same line or not.

For example,

.result_custommeta { display: block; }

will make each meta field appear on a new line.

.result_metaname_MYFIELD

This is the style for the individual meta field labels that appear next

to your search results. For example, if you have a custom meta

field for "PRICE" which is displayed as "Price: 8" in the search

How do I customize the look of my search page? 125

results. This would be the "Price:" part of the search result. So the

following, for example:

.result_metaname_PRICE { font-weight: bold; }

will make the word "Price:" appear in bold, while the value will

remain normal (e.g. "Price: 8")

.result_metavalue_MYFIELD

This is the style for the individual meta field values that appear next

to your search results. For example, if you have a custom meta

field for "PRICE" which is displayed as "Price: 8" in the search

results. This would be the "8" part of the search result. So the

following, for example:

.result_metavalue_PRICE { font-style italic; }

will make the value "8" appear in italics.

.zoom_metaform

This is the part of the generated search form containing the meta

search fields/criteria that the user can search by.

.zoom_metaform_numeric

This is the input text box for meta fields which are specified as the

"Numeric" type.

.zoom_metaform_dropdown

This is the dropdown box for meta fields which are specified as the

"Dropdown text" type.

.zoom_metaform_multi

This is the multi-select box for meta fields which are specified as the

"Multi-select" type.

.zoom_metaform_money

This is the input text box for meta fields which are specified as the

"Money" type.

6.5 How do I modify the search form on the search page?

If you wish to modify the search form, you can either edit the script, or define your own search form,

with the following HTML form code:

If you wish to use your own search form, you may want to turn off the form displayed by the script from

the Search Page configuration tab, under the Form Format setting. See ‘ Configuring Zoom ’ for more

information.

Results per page:

</select>

Match:

any search words

all search words

</form>

Note: You must change “search.php” in the above HTML to the appropriate search

page: that is, “search.asp” for ASP users, “search.cgi” for CGI users, and

“search.html” for Javascript users.

Zoom Search Engine126

If you have categories enabled, and you wish to include the category drop-down boxes in your custom

search form, then you will need to manually specify these categories in HTML. Because these options vary

depending on your categories configuration, we can not provide the exact HTML you will require. The

best method is to simply allow the search script to generate the full search form once, click on "View

Source" in your browser and copy and paste the categories HTML required for your particular

configuration.

6.6 How can I add a search form to my menus, main page, etc.?

If you want to add a simple search form on your website’s main page, or navigation bar, etc, you can do

so by specifying the following HTML on that page.

</form>

Please change “search.php” in the above HTML to the appropriate search page: that is, “search.asp” for

ASP users, “search.cgi” for CGI users, and “search.html” for JavaScript users.

Note also, the relative location of the search script from where this HTML is placed (eg. if the form is

used in a page that is one directory down from the search script, you would need to link to “../

search.php”).

Alternatively, you can use an absolute path to the search script (so that no matter where you place the

above HTML, it will still find the file), for example:

...

</form>

If you wish to include more search options (such as match any search words / all search words, etc.)

refer to the example in "How do I modify the search form".

6.7 Advanced template options

Zoom now provides advanced template options so you can customize the appearance of your search

results outside of what is possible with CSS, and without having to modify the search script. This allows

you to customize the location of headings, summary information, search boxes, and more. Simply by

placing additional tags in your template file.

The default  tag will provide the complete standard results layout. This is

recommended for users who are happy with the default layout, or who are new to Zoom customizations.

Note: The  tag and all of the following template tags are

case sensitive. This means you must specify them in uppercase as shown here.

For more advanced users, you can now specify individual elements as necessary and remove the <!--

ZOOMSEARCH--> tag from use. Items can be repeated multiple times or not shown at all.

For example, one commonly requested feature in the past was to be able to reproduce the "Results

Pages: 1 2 3 Next >>" links at the top of the results. You can do this by simply adding a <!--

ZOOM_SHOW_PAGENUMBERS--> tag before your results.

How do I customize the look of my search page? 127

Here is a listing of the advanced template tag options available:

Template tags in

"search_template.html"

Description

This is the search result heading, e.g. "Search results for: cat

food"

This is the summary text at the top of the results, e.g. "x results

found"

This is only available when Categories are enabled. It is a

breakdown of the categories that your search results belong to.

E.g. "Refine your search by category: News (3) Knowledge

base (2) PDF files (10)"

This is any spelling suggestion, or tip to search again when there

are few results.

This is the number of pages of results found. E.g. "x pages of

results."

This is the option to switch between "Sort by relevance" and

"Sort by date" when sorting by date is enabled in the Indexer.

This is the time taken to perform the search. E.g. "Search took

0.2 seconds"

This is the recommended links.

These are the links to the different pages of results,

e.g. "Results Pages: 1 2 3 Next >>"

This show the actual search results.

This produces the default search form. You do not need to use

the  and <!--

ZOOM_SHOW_FORMEND--> tag for this. The single tag itself will

create the entire search form for you.

This specifies the start of a search form.

This specifies the end of a search form.

<!--

ZOOM_SHOW_CUSTOMMETAOPTIONS-->

These should be pretty self explanatory. They are the different

elements that make up the search form. They must be within the

and <!--ZOOM_SHOW_FORMEND--

> tags mentioned above. Use these tags if you want to create a

custom search form that is different to the default generated by

Advanced template options in JavaScript

Zoom Search Engine128

The JavaScript version has a very different syntax for the template options, due in nature to the way the

JavaScript language works. However, it is possible to configure the layout of most elements in a similar

fashion to the other versions as described above.

By default, your "search.html" page will contain the following line to indicate where you want your search

form, and results to appear within your page.

However, if you wish to specify the individual elements, you will need to remove this line, and insert each element specifically.

To do this, first you must insert the following line before any other "Zoom" function call:

Then after this, you can specify any of the following tags to show the individual elements.

For a search form, you will need to begin and end it like this:

...

...

Only form elements need to be enclosed in the ZoomShowFormStart and ZoomShowFormEnd calls.

Everything else only needs to be after the ZoomInitSearch() line.

The full list of available "tags" are below:

Template tags in "search.html"

for the JavaScript version

Description

This is the search result heading, e.g. "Search

results for: cat food"

This is the summary text at the top of the results,

e.g. "x results found"

This is only available when Categories are enabled.

It is a breakdown of the categories that your search

results belong to. E.g. "Refine your search by

category: News (3) Knowledge base (2) PDF

files (10)"

This is the number of pages of results found. E.g. "x

pages of results."

This is the option to switch between "Sort by

relevance" and "Sort by date" when sorting by date

is enabled in the Indexer.

This is the time taken to perform the search. E.g.

"Search took 0.2 seconds"

This is the recommended links.

How do I customize the look of my search page? 129

These are the links to the different pages of

results,

e.g. "Results Pages: 1 2 3 Next >>"

This show the actual search results.

This produces the default search form. You do not

need to use the ZoomShowFormStart() and

ZoomShowFormEnd() tag for this. The single tag

itself will create the entire search form for you.

This specifies the start of a search form.

This specifies the end of a search form.

ZoomShowSearchBox();

ZoomShowSearchButton();

ZoomShowResultsPerPage();

ZoomShowMatchOptions();

ZoomShowCategories();

ZoomShowMetaFields();

These should be pretty self explanatory. They are

the different elements that make up the search

form. They must be within the

ZoomShowFormStart() and ZoomShowFormEnd()

tags mentioned above. Use these tags if you want

to create a custom search form that is different to

the default generated by ZoomShowSearchForm().

6.8 More how-to's

For more how-to’s regarding customizing your search page and integrating it with your site, visit our

Support and FAQ webpage online at:

http://www.zoomsearchengine.com/zoom/support/

6.9 Changing your default editor

When you edit a HTML or script file from Zoom (from either the Templates menu or the Configuration

Window), it will open up in the default editor for that file type in Windows. However, some users’

computers may not be setup to use their preferred applications for certain file types (not to mention a lot

of applications “hijack” certain file associations upon installation). If you want Zoom to edit a file type with

a different application, you will need to change your Windows file associations.

In Windows XP to Vista, you need to open up the “Control Panel” in Windows, and select “Folder

Options”. Click on the “File types” tab and select the extension you wish to modify (“HTML” for the search

page, and “PHP”, “ASP”, or “JS” for the search scripts). Then click on the “Advanced” button, and select

the “Edit” action from the list. Click on the “Edit…” button and here you can specify the application to open

this file with.

In Windows 7 and later, you go to "Control Panel"->"Default Programs"->"Set Associations" to do this.

For more information, please consult Windows Help.

Once you have done this, selecting the “Customize search page appearance” and “Modify search scripts”

options in Zoom will always open the file in your preferred editor.

Zoom Search Engine130

Note: Due to known issues with the way it handles HTML files, MS Word is NOT recommended for editing

HTML files and in particular, the search page template for Zoom. One such issue is when it automatically

tries to strip, remove, or re-arrange HTML comments it considers unnecessary – which happens to be

required by Zoom. There are also general-use problems with the additional meta data it adds to a web

page, which causes it to not render correctly or at all in most versions of Internet Explorer.

Advanced Options

Part

Zoom Search Engine132

7 Advanced Options

7.1 International / foreign language support

Zoom supports a wide variety of languages such as French, German, Italian, Hebrew, Cyrillic (Russian),

Greek, Arabic, and others. But the search page must be configured accordingly, depending on the

encoding you have used on your website.

The Zoom Indexer application supports Unicode, and thus, multi-byte character strings. This allows you to

index and configure your search engine for many languages using the UTF-8 encoding. However, due to

the nature of the scripting platform and the server restrictions of your web host, searching for some

Asian languages such as Japanese, Chinese, and Korean are limited. Searches will still be functional but

accuracy is hampered due to the lack of a proper language definition to identify words.

For the following language settings to work, make sure your search template HTML file is specified for

the correct charset. For example,

Zoom will warn you if it finds that the search template in the output directory does not have the same

character set selected for the indexing configuration (specified under “Languages” in the Configuration

window).

Note: By specifying the use of Unicode and UTF-8, the indexer will also store all

entries in the search engine data files as UTF-8 encoded characters. This means

that the translation of accented HTML entities (such as “ü” etc.) will be

converted to UTF-8 encoded characters. When UTF-8 is not selected, the

translation happens using standard ANSI instead.

See also:

European languages (French, German, Danish, Swedish, etc.)

Russian (Cyrillic)

Japanese

7.1.1 European languages (French, German, Danish, Swedish, etc.)

European websites commonly use the “Western European” character encoding, CP1252 (also known as

"windows-1252"). A few web sites will also use "iso-8859-1" which is almost the same as "windows-

1252", and some are in Unicode UTF-8.

If your website uses the "windows-1252” encoding:

· Select “Specify other encoding” in the Configuration window, and the name of the encoding you are

using (ie. “windows-1252”), before indexing your website.

If your website uses UTF-8 encoding:

· Select “Use Unicode (UTF-8 encoding)” in the Configuration window before indexing your website.

Advanced Options 133

7.1.2 Russian (Cyrillic)

Russian websites commonly use one of three encodings: KOI8, CP1251 (aka "windows-1251"), and

Unicode UTF-8.

If your website uses KOI8 or “windows-1251” encoding:

· Select “Specify other encoding” in the Configuration window, and the name of the encoding you are

using (ie. “windows-1251”), before indexing your website.

If your website uses UTF-8 encoding:

· Select “Use Unicode (UTF-8 encoding)” in the Configuration window before indexing your website.

7.1.3 Japanese

Japanese websites commonly use one of two encodings: Shift-JIS, and Unicode UTF-8.

Zoom does not currently support indexing Shift-JIS websites.

If your website uses UTF-8, ensure that:

· Select “Use Unicode (UTF-8 encoding)” in the Configuration window before indexing your website.

· We also recommend enabling “Substring match for all searches” option in the Configuration window, to

allow for matching on words that are not delimited by a space character (as is often the case in

Japanese).

7.2 Translating the search page

You can modify the text that appears on the search page by editing the Zoom Language Files (.ZLANG

files) from the Configuration window (under the “Languages” tab). Here you can edit or create new

ZLANG files, or select one of the default language files to use.

Note: Before you start editing ZLANG files, you should first create your own language file

(eg. “MyFrench.zlang”). This is because the default files that come with Zoom

(English.zlang, French.zlang, etc.) will be overwritten when you re-install the software, or

upgrade to a new version. If you do make all your changes in the default file, and you re-

installed Zoom and find that your changes have been overwritten, you can find a backup of

them in the “lang-backup” folder under your Zoom program directory.

The ZLANG file format is simply a line-by-line entry, beginning with a “STR_” key word (such as

“STR_FORM_SEARCHFOR”), followed by an equals sign, and the actual text to be used. You must always

leave the “STR_” part of the line intact, and only modify the text after the equals sign. The following is an

example of a ZLANG file.

STR_FORM_SEARCHFOR=Search for:

STR_FORM_SUBMIT_BUTTON=Submit

STR_FORM_RESULTS_PER_PAGE=Results per page:

STR_FORM_CATEGORY=Category:

STR_FORM_CATEGORY_ALL=All

STR_FORM_MATCH=Match:

STR_FORM_ANY_SEARCH_WORDS=any search words

STR_FORM_ALL_SEARCH_WORDS=all search words

Note that an entry can not span multiple lines (so you should disable “Word Wrap” in Notepad). Also, the

STR key words are predefined and can not be modified. Below is an extract of a ZLANG file.

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Use the “English.zlang” default file as your reference for text which can be translated, and the overall

format of the file.

Note: All ZLANG files must be in Unicode encoding. You can save a file in Unicode

with Notepad, by clicking on the File menu, and selecting “Save As…”. Locate the

‘Encoding” dropdown menu at the bottom of the Save As file window. Select

“Unicode” here, and save your file.

7.3 Importing and Exporting additional start URLs

In spider mode, you can import additional spider URLs from a text file by clicking on the

Import

button

and specifying its filename. The following is an example of a text file that can be imported by this feature.

http://news.mysite.com/

http://www.myalternativesite.com/

http://www.mysite.com/spider_sitemap.html

http://www.friends_site.com/

These URLs will be imported into the list and given the default option of “index and follow”.

It can also import from a list of URLs with comma-separated values to specify the indexing option of that

URL. The format for this advanced import list is as follows:

<URL>, <URL option>, [<base URL> [, LIMIT=<limit>] [, WEIGHT=<weight>] ]

The following is an example list in the above specified format:

http://news.mysite.com/, INDEX_AND_FOLLOW

http://www.myalternativesite.com/, INDEX_AND_FOLLOW

http://www.othersite.com/, INDEX_AND_FOLLOW, http://pages.othersite.com/

http://www.mysite.com/spider_sitemap.html, FOLLOW_ONLY

http://www.myschool.edu/bob/index.html, INDEX_AND_FOLLOW, http://www.myschool.edu/, LIMIT=50, WEIGHT=-2

http://www.friends_site.com/, INDEX_ONLY

The URL options available correspond to the “Advanced Spider URL options” described in section 2.1.4 as

follows:

· INDEX_AND_FOLLOW: Index page and follow links (default)

· INDEX_AND_FOLLOW_ALL: Index page and follow all links

· INDEX_ONLY: Index single page only

· FOLLOW_ONLY: Follow links only

· FOLLOW_ALL: Follow all links on this page only

See "Start spider URL" for more details on each of these options.

The LIMIT= flag must be followed by a value specifying a restriction on the maximum number of files to

index for a particular start point. This is the same setting as the one which you can specify on the

"Advanced Spider URL options" window.

The WEIGHT= flag must be followed by a value which specifies the boosting or indexing weighting for the

pages under this start point. This should be a value between +5 and -5 similar to the PAGEBOOST meta

value. It is the equivalent of specifying PAGEBOOST meta tags for each of the individual pages that are

indexed under the start point in question. See "Weightings" for more information.

Advanced Options 135

You can also export your current list of URLs to a CSV text file by way of the

Export

button, which will

export in the latter layout as given in the above example.

7.4 Editing the search script

If you are familiar with scripting, you can edit the search script source code by clicking on the

“Templates” menu in the Zoom application and selecting “Edit search script source”.

In most cases, you would not need to do this, because most customizations can be made via Zoom’s

Configuration window and search template.

However, some advanced users may want to do this in order to customize certain responses, or simply to

add some Server Side Includes (SSIs) for additional navigation bars and other page elements that

require server side processing (as this will not work in the search template HTML file).

7.5 Skipping sections of a page

Sometimes there are situations where you would want to stop a section of a page from being indexed.

This may be common headers, footers, or navigation menus which appear on every page of your site.

This can be accomplished by enclosing the unwanted section of the HTML document within the following

tags:  and . Note that this tag must be used as it is, in upper

case, with no space characters within the tags. For example,

<p>This text will be indexed</p>

<p>This section is skipped</p>

<p>and no indexing will occur</p>

<p>Indexing starts again here</p>

Note: A  tag

must

be followed by a  tag

somewhere later in the page for it to take effect. You also cannot have nested

ZOOMSTOP tags. Zoom will simply skip starting from the ZOOMSTOP tag found, up

to the first occurrence of ZOOMRESTART.

This is often used to exclude navigation bars and menus. Note however, that the hypertext links within a

ZOOMSTOP and ZOOMRESTART section would still be followed in Spider indexing mode.

If you would like to stop the spider from following links, you can use the  and

tags. Links within these tags would not be followed, but when used alone,

the text would still be indexed.

If you wish to skip a section of a page from being indexed AND from having its links followed, you should

use both tags to enclose a section. For example:

<p>This text will be indexed</p>

<p>This section is skipped and <a href=”test.html”>this link will not be followed</a></p>

<p>Indexing starts again here</p>

Note that when you are using the two tags combined, you must specify the ZOOMSTOPFOLLOW tag

within the ZOOMSTOP block, as shown in the above example. A ZOOMSTOP tag within a

ZOOMSTOPFOLLOW block will be ignored.

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7.6 Manually add words into the index

There is often the need to add words into the index that are not present in the text of the page itself. By

doing this it is possible to have search matches on commonly misspelt words and synonyms of words that

do appear on the page. Watch the search log closely in order to identify the common words that people

are searching for which generate 0 results. These words may be candidates for manual insertion into the

index.

To add words into the index for a certain page, you need to create a "ZOOMWORDS" meta-tag in the

HTML header of that page. For example, on a page about music, some additional words could be added.

It is assumed that these words are not already in the text of the page.

The standard <meta name="keywords"> tag is supported and can also be used. However, note that

some external Internet search engines (such as Google) ignore or even penalise a page’s rank if they find

what they consider to be excessively repeated or misspellings, so the ZOOMWORDS meta-tag is provided

to allow you to ‘force’ page ranks internally, within your own website, without affecting external search

engines.

Note: You must check the “Meta keywords” box on the “Indexing Options” tab of

the Configuration window in order to enable support for both ZOOMWORDS and

Meta keywords.

7.7 Alternative page titles and descriptions

In some cases, you may have designed titles and meta descriptions which target Internet-wide search

engines. For example, it may be part of your SEO (Search Engine Optimization) strategy, in having more

generic titles that attract visitors to distinguish your site from another.

However, these titles and descriptions may not be so appropriate for the search results within your own

website. For example, if every page of your site has a title which begins with "ACME Co. - Leading

Provider of Electronic Goods - ... " then your internal search results (served by Zoom) will all look

remarkably similar at first glance and hard to tell apart.

To avoid this, you can specify alternative titles and descriptions for Zoom to use. This is done by having a

ZOOMTITLE and ZOOMDESCRIPTION meta tag.

Here is an example of what you could have in the header of a web page:

<title>ACME Co. - Leading Provider of Electronic Products - Latest News and

Announcements</title>

everything from USB sandwiches to Firewire donuts!">

Note that meta tags need to be within the <head>...</head> section of the page, in compliance with

HTML Standards.

Note: You must have “Title of page” enabled for indexing (on the “Indexing

Options” panel of the Configuration tab) to index ZOOMTITLE meta tags, and "Meta

description" for ZOOMDESCRIPTION tags.

Advanced Options 137

7.8 Specifying a last-modified date for your web pages

You can configure Zoom to display the date and time for each search result and allow the user to sort

their results chronologically (see section 2.3.2 and 2.3.6). This normally uses the last-modified date and

time of the file according to the file system. However, this may not be very useful in cases such as

dynamically generated web pages (where it would use the date and time of the server-side script as

opposed to a date that is related to the content actually displayed).

In these cases, you can specify your own last-modified date and time in the form of a “http-equiv” Meta

tag such as the following:

Note that this is a standard Meta tag and would also be used by other spiders and applications. Note also

that the exact syntax for specifying the date and time must be followed.

The expected format for the date value is:

ddd, DD MMM YYYY HH:MM:SS [Timezone]

· ddd is the first three letters corresponding to the day of the week (eg. “Mon”, “Tue”, …)

· DD is the day of the month in numerals

· MMM is the first three letters for the name of the month (eg. “Jan”, “Feb”, …)

· YYYY is the year in numeral format (eg. 2005)

· HH:MM:SS is the time in hours, minutes, and seconds respectively. This must be specified in 24 hour

time.

· [Timezone] is optional (eg. “GMT”, “GMT-5”). Note that Zoom will not perform any timezone

conversions based on this.

7.9 Enable jump to match and highlight within document

You can setup highlighting to occur on the actual page of your website when you click on a search result.

However, this requires you to add some Javascript to each page of your site where you want this feature

to take effect. It will highlight the word that the user was looking for in the search engine, as well as

scroll the window down to the first appearance of the word.

Note: This feature only works for HTML web pages, and does not work for Word,

PDF, XLS and other document types. It also will not work for Javascript disabled

browsers. For PDF documents, you can enable a similar behaviour within Acrobat

Reader via the "Highlight and locate" option in the PDF plugin settings. See

"Configuring a plugin" for more information.

First, you must enable this option in the Configuration window (under the “Results Layout” tab).

Once you have enabled this option and re-indexed your website, you must locate the "highlight.js" file

included with Zoom. This file can be found in the "extras" folder, which you can access from Zoom

Indexer, by clicking on "Tools" in the menu and selecting the option to "Open 'Extras' folder" (also see

"Where is the Program Data directory?").

Zoom Search Engine138

Copy the "highlight.js" file from the "extras" folder to your website files, as you will need to link to the

"highlight.js" file from each page of your site that requires the feature.

For example, you could paste the following HTML in your site’s header or footer:

Note that you will need to specify the correct path to “highlight.js” depending on where the file is located

relative to the page. You will then need to modify the BODY tag on your page to include an "onLoad"

attribute, such as:

If for some reason you can not modify the body tag of your page, an alternative would be to put the

following line after the </body> tag of your page:

Once you have successfully applied the above changes, you should find that clicking on a search result will go straight to the word found and all matching words will be highlighted.

7.10 Search Statistics PHP Script

If you have PHP support on your web server, you can use a provided script ("report.php") to provide

online reporting for your search log. This allows you to provide live, up-to-date statistics on your website

without needing to download the log file manually and generate/upload your report.

You can find this script in the "extras" folder. From the Zoom Indexer, click on the "Tools" menu and

select "Open 'Extras' folder" to locate this file (also see "Where is the Program Data directory?").

Installation

Copy or upload this script to the same folder as the log file on the server.

If your logfile does not have the default name of “searchwords.log” open the php script in a text editor

and change this line:

$LOGFILENAME = "searchwords.log";

Advanced Options 139

To correspond to the filename of your log file.

Customization

PHP Variables

Inside the php script near the top of the file are customizable options. The php script can be edited with

any basic text editor. To change an option you should edit the value to the right of the equals sign. If the

value is encased in quotation marks they should be left in place. Also, the semi-colon at the end of each

line must remain in place as well for the script to work.

$LOGFILENAME = "searchwords.log";

The name of the log file that the statistics will be generated from.

$TEMPLOGNAME = "_tempsearchwords.log";

Name of temporary log file. This file will be created and written to during a trim operation. If the file

already exists it will be overwritten.

$BAR_LENGTH = 300;

The length in pixels of the longest bar in each bar chart .

//$PASSWORD_REPORT = "password";

This is the password required to generate a report. Note that the line begins with //, this means that the

line is commented and is not active. To enable password protection for generating a report remove the //

from the beginning of the line and change “password” to whatever you would like the password to be.

//$PASSWORD_TRIM = "password";

This is the password required to trim a log file. Note that the line begins with //, this means that the line

is commented and is not active. To enable password protection for trimming the log file remove the //

from the beginning of the line and change “password” to whatever you would like the password to be.

$ENABLE_TRIM = 1;

This line enables or disables the ability of the script to trim a log file. By default this is set to 1 (on). If you

would like to completely disable the trim functionality from the script please set this to 0.

$_DEBUG = 0;

Debug data on or off, you probably don't want to change this setting.

CSS Styles

Near the top of the PHP script are some CSS styles that can be used to change the look of the report.

Feel free to edit these however you like.

Report Configuration

Start Date / Finish Date

The reports will be generated based on a date range specified in these fields. The date range is

inclusive of the dates specified. The recommended format for entering dates is in the (year-month-

day) format however the script is able to recognize many formats so you can try entering in the date

however you like. The dates will be displayed in year-month-day format on the final report page so

you will know if the script understood what you meant. Some example dates are:

• “now” – Today’s date

• “3rd March 2007”

Zoom Search Engine140

• “-1 Month” – Today’s date minus 1 month

Top 10 Search phrases

This provides a bar chart of the top 10 search phrases made on your website. This gives you a good

indication of what people are looking for on your website.

Top 10 Search Phrases that returned no matches

This provides a bar chart of the top 10 search phrases on your website which found “no results”. This

is useful for determining what your visitors are searching for on your website but not managing to

find. You can use this information to provide content that better cater your website to your visitors (or

determine what meta keywords to add to allow your users to find what they are looking for).

Searches per day

This provides a bar chart representing the number of searches that are made on your website per

day.

Searches per week

This provides a bar chart representing the number of searches made on your website per week.

Searches per month

This provides a bar chart representing the number of searches made on your website per month.

List the top x searched words (sorted by popularity)

This option appends a HTML table of search words (sorted by popularity). You can specify the

number of searched words you would like to list here.

Raw Data Output

A table containing the raw data from the log file for the date range specified. Because this data can

be quite large a maximum of 5000 log entries will be displayed. If you need to see more consider

opening the log file directly in a text editor.

Password

If you have enabled password protection for generating logs you will need to enter your password on

the configuration page.

Trim Functionality

The trim section of the configuration page allows you to delete entries out of the log file, making it

smaller and faster to generate reports from. Consider using this if report generation is taking too long or

timing out. Please note however that this operation cannot be undone and any deletions are permanent.

Password

If you have enabled password protection for trimming the log file you will need to enter your

password here.

Trim Log Entries Before

Any log entries before this date will be permanently deleted. Like the start/finish dates in the report

configuration this field can take a number of formats, once you click the Trim Log button you will be

taken to a confirmation page that will display the entered date in year-month-day format to confirm

the script understood what you meant and to make sure you really want to delete the records.

Advanced Options 141

7.11 Integrating Zoom in your own applications

Software developers looking to include a search engine feature as part of their own applications can

integrate Zoom Indexer into their software and provide dynamic indexing and searching on demand.

Note: A single license of Zoom is required for each copy of the Zoom Indexer

application installed on a computer. This does not permit you to distribute the

registered version of the Zoom Indexer software. A special distribution license (and

a custom built version of Zoom) must be purchased separately if you wish to

distribute Zoom Indexer with your software. Please contact us for more details.

Console mode (Enterprise Edition only)

The Enterprise Edition of Zoom allows the Indexer to run in "console mode". When Zoom is running in

this mode, it will not display a GUI nor require any user interaction. With the use of pre-configured .ZCFG

files, the Zoom Indexer can then be spawned as a process to index files as needed.

All indexing progress, and error messages will be written to “stdout” and you can capture the output for

internal analysis, or display to the user as you wish. The Indexer will also return an exit code indicating

the outcome of the indexing.

Console mode must be specified alongside an AutoRun option, and a configuration filename. The

following example will run the Indexer in console mode, indexing offline, using the configuration settings

defined in "zoom.zcfg":

ZoomIndexer.exe -c -o zoom.zcfg

Note: If "stdout" is not redirected to a pipe or file, Zoom will automatically create a

console window to display the output. Note also that Zoom will always display a

splash screen, even in console mode. We can provide a custom build without the

splash screen for developers who have purchased the special distribution license.

Please contact us for more details.

Redirecting stdout

This can be done programatically (by the software spawning this process) or via the command line with

the use of the greater than sign (">"). eg. redirecting stdout to file:

ZoomIndexer.exe -c -o zoom.zcfg > output.txt

Exit codes

The Indexer will also return an exit code indicating the outcome of the indexing. The possible exit codes

are:

Indexer executed successfully.

Indexing completed with the maximum unique words limit having been reached.

Indexing completed with the maximum pages limit having been reached.

Invalid configuration

Indexing failed

Zoom Search Engine142

Writing the index data output failed

Report generating failed

FTP upload failed

Installation error

7.12 The indexing process

For your information, we have documented the basic process in which text is extracted from the HTML

source file. This may be useful if you are looking into the operation of the Indexer to determine why

certain content is not being indexed, or if you are attempting to make advanced changes to the script.

1. Remove all text between PHP markers ( <? ... ?> )

2. Remove all text between ASP markers ( <% ... %> )

3. Remove all text between Zoom comments ( ... )

4. Remove all text between HTML comments (  )

5. Remove all Java scripting sections ( <script> ... </script> )

6. Remove all style sections ( <style> ... </style> )

7. Extract the Title information and description meta-tag information from the file header.

8. Remove all HTML tags ( <...> )

9. Convert HTML character entities and numerical entities back to plain text.

10. Index all remaining text.

11. Index any additional key words found in the “ZOOMWORDS” and “Keywords” meta-tag.

7.13 Word delimitation when indexing

When building the index, the indexer must decide how to split a sentence up into words. Any characters

in the following range are considered to be part of a word.

· Lower case characters, ‘a’ to ‘z’

· Upper case characters, ‘A’ to ‘Z’

· Numbers, ‘0’ to ‘9’

· Foreign characters, ‘À’ to ‘ÿ’

· A join character (defined by the user – eg. dot (‘.’), dash/hyphen (‘-‘), underscore, etc.) immediately

followed by another valid character (one of the above), eg. “2.5” and “F.B.I.”. See "Indexing options"

for more information.

Any characters not in this range will force the current word to end and a new word to start. For example,

based on the default configuration, this sentence,

“Record number 653-45+ABCD is invalid”

will be broken up into 6 words,

Advanced Options 143

“Record”, “number”, “653-45”, “ABCD”, “is”, “invalid”

7.14 Word delimitation when searching

When a visitor on your search page enters a search query, the script must decide how to split a search

phrase up into search words. This is now determined based on the same settings you make for indexing

(see "Word delimitation when indexing" and "Indexing options" for more information), so if words

containing dots are indexed as word joining characters, then searches containing dots will also be treated

as a single word.

7.15 Other tips

· A small index is a fast index. Filter directories, pages and words that contain redundant or useless

information (from a search engine point of view) by use of the Skip options. This can reduce the size of

the data files and speed up the search process.

· Save your configuration for each website, and create a shortcut that you can just double click on to re-

index the whole site. See the command line parameter section for more information on how to do this.

You can also schedule Zoom to index automatically on a regular basis.

· If you need to boost a page up the search result ranking for a particular search term but don’t want to

change the text, use the ZOOMWORDS meta-tag and include the search term a few times.

· Turn on the search term logging feature. If users are matching too many pages use the Boolean AND

option for multiple search terms. If visitors are often getting zero results try adding some additional

keywords in the ZOOMWORDS meta-tag.

Troubleshooting and

support

Part

Troubleshooting and support 145

8 Troubleshooting and support

8.1 Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

We provide an extensive and up-to-date online support section with many Frequently Asked Questions

(FAQs) and solutions.

Please visit our support site at:

http://www.zoomsearchengine.com/zoom/support/

8.2 How to enter in my license key

After purchasing the software a license key is sent out via E-mail. This license key needs to be entered

into the Zoom software (under the "Help" menu, select "Enter license key").

When entering a license key, copy and paste the license key from the E-mail. Doing a copy and paste will

avoid the possibility of a typing mistake.

License keys purchased for previous major versions of the software will not work in the latest (e.g.

license keys for V5 will not work with V6), and vice versa. So check the software version matches the key

you purchased. If you have an old license key, you can upgrade to the latest version or you can continue

to use the older version. More information on upgrades can be found on our website here:

http://www.zoomsearchengine.com/sales/upgrades.php

Find your license key

After you have placed an order you will receive an e-mail that contains details about your order, your

user name and your license key. It should look something like this:

Note that the keys may vary in length and be shorter or longer than the examples above.

Step 1 - Make sure you have the right software

Make sure that the product that you have downloaded and installed, matches the version of the product

you have purchased. Note that the key should be entered in the Free Edition of the software to transform

it to the registered edition you purchased. Download and install the latest version of the software, if

required.

Step 2 - Copy your user name and key from the E-mail

Zoom Search Engine146

Select the entire key, including the -----START_OF_KEY----- and -----END_OF_KEY----- flags:

Copy your key to the clipboard. This can be done by using the Edit / Copy menu item in most E-Mail

programs. Alternatively you can use the CTRL-C key combination on the keyboard.

Step 3 - Paste your user name and key into the software

Start up the software and select "Help"->"Enter license key" in the menus. Paste the key in the window

provided by right clicking and selecting "Paste" or by using the CTRL-V key combination on the keyboard.

Click on "Register". If the user name and key was accepted, the program will restart and identify itself as

the registered edition of the software in the title bar of the window.

Remember to keep your key safe

The e-mail containing the license key should be kept in a safe place in case the software ever needs to

be reinstalled. Your User Name and Key will also be required to be re-entered when software upgrades

are released.

Still have a problem?

If you still have a problem, check the following.

· No extra characters were included, be especially careful about not copying extra space characters or

new line characters.

· Your user name is exactly as it appears in the E-Mail, using a different user name will not work.

· If you typed in your user name or key, rather than copying and pasting, check that you have not made

a typing mistake and check that upper and lower case characters are correct. Upper and lower case

are important.

Troubleshooting and support 147

If the above doesn't fix your problem, contact us and describe the problem you have encountered and

include your order number and key.

8.3 Discussion forums

You can visit our online discussion forum for help and advice on using Zoom. It is an active community

made up of many Zoom users sharing and seeking hints and tips, and is also frequented by the PassMark

developers and support team.

Please drop by and say hello, or feel free to post a question:

http://www.zoomsearchengine.com/forum/

8.4 Known issues

The following are some known issues, technical limitations and their possible solutions or workarounds.

Note that we can provide custom development and support. So if you need a new feature, a work-around

to a known issue, or some serious technical support, e-mail us at support@passmark.com for a

quotation.

· When given links (or a start URL in spider mode) without the filename (eg: http://mywebsite.com/), it

may be indexed twice if there is another link somewhere else on the website which points to the same

place, but with the actual filename specified (such as http://mywebsite.com/index.html, http://

mywebsite.com/home.htm, etc.). To prevent this, use the "Duplicate page detection" option.

· When URLs with identical content are found using the "Duplicate page detection" option, only the first

URL encountered will be indexed.

· Spidering dynamic websites that utilise session IDs as part of their URL (as GET parameters) will vary

in effectiveness depending on how the website uses the session information. There is no easy solution

to identifying session IDs, so you will have to configure the indexer to scan accordingly, if you do not

wish Zoom to index the parts of your website which require session information.

· Some documents in PDF format may make use of complicated layouts such as columns, etc. This can

confuse the indexer’s context descriptions (finding words from different columns but on the same line)

and exact phrase matching. Try the alternate PDF scan mode (see "Configuring a plugin" for more

information) if you are having this problem.

· Very long words that have more that 35 characters in the word are split into two words in the index.

· Highlighting may not work on some words with special accented characters.

· An exact phrase can not be matched if it begins with a skipped word. The user will get a message

saying that the phrase is in the skipped word list.

· When “substring matching” is enabled, a skipped word may return results. For example, if the skipped

word “of” is searched with this function, it may return results containing “office” or “often”. Note also

that the highlighting feature may highlight occurrences of the word “of” in this case, despite it not being

used as part of the searching criteria (i.e. the word was “skipped” in the indexing and searching, as

intended).

Zoom Search Engine148

8.5 Technical limitations

We document technical limitations of the software because we understand the importance for advanced

users or developers to have the most comprehensive information possible about their websites and

development environment. Note that we can provide a quote for custom modifications if you require

different specifications.

Maximum word length

35 characters. (Fixed limit)

Maximum title length

512 characters. (Fixed limit)

Maximum URL length

2083 characters (Fixed limit)

Maximum number of words to skip

400 (Fixed limit)

Maximum number of entries in the Page Skip list

1000 (Fixed limit)

Maximum number of extensions to scan for

50 (Fixed limit)

Maximum length of meta keywords tag

(This is a shared limit with the ZOOMWORDS meta tag,

and the Dublin Core meta tags)

20000 characters (Fixed limit)

Maximum number of dropdown values for any

single Custom Meta field

255

8.6 Notes for users upgrading from Zoom 4.x

Due to the introduction of new CSS classes (and the removal of some old CSS classes), we would

recommend that you allow Zoom to create a new copy of "search_template.html" in the output directory

(that is, remove or rename your existing search template). This way you can view the new default search

template, and adopt the CSS styles used to specify the appearance of the recommended links, and other

new attributes.

See the "CSS class listing" for more detailed information on the new CSS classes used.

8.7 Notes for users upgrading from Zoom 3.x

Users upgrading their sites and indexing configurations from Zoom 3.x should note some significant

differences with the use of template files.

· The Indexer will no longer overwrite the “search_template.html” (or “search.html”) file in the output

directory IF the file already exists.

· You should NOT modify “search_template_src.html” and “search_src.html” in the Zoom installation

folder. You should now only need to modify the search template file in the OUTPUT directory (where

the index files are written to).

All existing users should allow Zoom to overwrite the “search_template_src.html” and “search_src.html”

files found in the Zoom installation folder (usually “C:\Program Files\Zoom Search\scripts\...”). Backup

your customized version of these files, if necessary, before hand.

The new method of how you should go about changing the search template is as follows:

1. When you index a site for the first time, Zoom will create a copy of the default template in the

output directory. The default templates are the “search_template_src.html” and “search_src.html”

files (which you should no longer modify).

Troubleshooting and support 149

2. Subsequent indexing sessions will NOT overwrite the search template in the output directory. This

means that you can make your modifications to the search template file directly, and save your

changes to the output directory.

3. You no longer need to manage multiple “Custom search template paths” in the Advanced

configuration tab. You simply have different search templates in different output folders.

4. When a search template file is missing in the output directory, Zoom will create a copy of the default

template there the next time it indexes. This means that, if you need to return to the default

template at any point, you can delete or rename your template in the output directory, and re-index.

It is recommended to start with a fresh new default search template from Version 5.0 and adapt that to

the look of your 3.x template. This means you should index once to an empty directory, so that it creates

the default template file for you to use as a reference. There have been some changes with new

stylesheet classes defined, and more importantly for the Javascript version, it now needs to link to

different script (.js) files than before.

8.8 Contacting us

Web: http://www.zoomsearchengine.com/zoom/

E-mail: support@passmark.com

Visit our website for more contact information.

Appendix

Part

Appendix 151

9 Appendix

9.1 What is PHP, ASP, CGI, or JavaScript?

This chapter serves to provide beginners with an explanation of some of the technologies and

terminologies used in Zoom.

9.1.1 What is PHP?

PHP (PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor) is a software package installed on web servers to provide scripting

capabilities. It is commonly found on web servers running Apache (as it is now built-in by default), but it

can be installed on IIS servers also. Since March 2004, there are a reported 15,528,732 website domains

which use PHP (source: Netcraft Survey).

You can check with your web host to find out if PHP is available on your hosting account. Alternatively,

you can upload a text file containing the following (as test.php):

<?php

phpinfo();

When you open this file up from your browser (http://www.mysite.com/test.php), it should provide

detailed information on the PHP installed on the server. If not, this means you do not have PHP support

configured on your server and you should consult your web host or use one of the other platform options

available.

9.1.2 What is ASP (Classic ASP)?

ASP (Active Server Pages), also known as Classic ASP, is the Microsoft equivalent to PHP, and comes

packaged with most default IIS (Internet Information Services) web servers. Chances are if you have a

Windows-based web server, you will have ASP available to you. It can also be available on some non-IIS

servers, but they are less common.

Note that ASP is not the same as ASP.NET (Microsoft’s new server-side platform), and they

are not compatible.

Check with your web host to find out if ASP is available on your hosting account.

9.1.3 What is ASP.NET?

ASP.NET is a web application framework from Microsoft. It is NOT the same as ASP (which is also

referred to as "Classic ASP") and have very different requirements. It is generally only available on IIS

web servers.

This option is only recommended for advanced web developers who are working on existing .NET

websites and need to integrate the search engine into their .NET web application. It requires a Zoom

ASP.NET Native Control to be installed directly onto the web server. Please see "Installing the ASP.NET

native control" for more information.

9.1.4 What is CGI?

CGI (Common Gateway Interface) is a method of running programs on a server over the web. This is

different to PHP and ASP in that it does not have to load and interpret a “script”, and is not limited by the

Zoom Search Engine152

technical capabilities of a scripting platform. In fact, the scripting engines for PHP and ASP are CGI

applications themselves. As such, CGI provides a way to run web applications requiring maximum

performance and efficiency, and you will find it used on most enterprise-scale sites such as popular sites

like eBay, Google, and Yahoo.

Due to the less restrictive nature of CGI applications, some web hosts (especially those offering cheaper

packages) do not provide CGI support for security reasons. In addition to this, setting up and installing

CGI applications can be more complex, especially if you have never installed one before.

For information on installing and uploading the Zoom CGI, please refer to "Additional notes for uploading

CGI".

9.1.5 What is Javascript?

Javascript is a scripting language that allows a web page to tell the browser what to do. It is a client-side

language, meaning that it is interpreted and processed on the computer viewing the web site – not on the

server. This means that it is usually very limited in what it can do, but can be convenient since it does not

rely on any special requirements on the server-side, and can also run off a CD with no web server

present.

Please note that Javascript is not the same as Java, and they bear only marginal similarities in syntax.

Java is a powerful, general-purpose programming language and can run outside of a web browser.

Zoom provides a Javascript version of the search script to cater for users who wish to run their search

engines on a CD-ROM, or who have a very restricted hosting environment with no server-side scripting

capability. However, due to the technical constraints of Javascript on most browsers, we are unable to

provide the full number of features (such as context descriptions) that are available with the other

platform options. It is also unsuitable for large volumes of data, and sites of over 1000 pages or with a

large number of unique words, will not run on some browsers.

There is an alternative to running Zoom on CD/DVDs, and that is to include a specialised mini-web server

on your CD, so that you can run the CGI or PHP version off the CD. More information is available in "Using

the CGI or PHP version on a CD/DVD distribution".

9.2 Base URL for USB distribution (absolute and relative paths)

Understanding absolute and relative paths are important to determine the most consistent and effective

way of linking to files, and it is useful knowledge to all web developers.

The following is a brief explanation for those who are not yet familiar with these forms of file paths,

which are especially necessary for defining the base URL for USB and offline distribution.

Absolute paths

Absolute paths refer to specific locations, independent of the current location of the file. These usually

begin with a “/” or even the domain of the site (eg. “http://mysite.com/”). When a path begins with a “/”,

this is a reference to the root directory.

For instance, if you have the following files:

Appendix 153

Now assuming you have your search files in the

folder, and you need to link to a file in the

articles

folder. An absolute link would be “/MyCD/articles/page1.html”. Note that this link refers to the location of

the file from the root directory, and thus it will refer to the same file regardless of where you place this

link.

However, when you copy the contents of the “MyCD” folder to your USB, it may now look something like

this:

As you can see, a reference to “/MyCD/articles/page1.html” would no longer be valid. The link would now

have to be “/articles/page1.html”.

Because of this issue, we generally recommend against using absolute paths if you intend to publish your

files on a USB. It also causes similar issues to those described above on different Operating Systems,

such as on MacOS, which may refer to the USB drive as a part of the path (eg: the path would be “/usb1/

articles/page1.html”).

Relative paths

Relative paths refer to file locations based on the current directory. That is, they often refer to locations

in the form of “up one directory level” and often begin with one or two dots (“.”). An example would be

“../index.html” which would refer to the file “index.html” one directory level up.

A key to relative paths:

· A single dot (“.”) refers to the current directory, eg. “./test.html” would refer to the file “test.html” in

the current directory.

· Double dots (“..”) refer to the previous directory, eg. “../test.html” would refer to the file “test.html” in

the previous directory.

· To refer to a location which is more than one directory level up, use a combination of double dots, eg.

“../../test.html” would refer to a file two directory levels up.

In the case of the illustrated example above (for absolute paths), you would link to the same file with a

relative path of “../articles/page1.html”. This would then still be correct when your files are moved off to

a CD-ROM, because the articles folder is always one level up from the search folder.

What should I use as the base URL for a USB?

Zoom Search Engine154

If you need your search files to run on a USB stick (this also assumes you are using the Javascript

version), in most cases, a base URL of “./” would work. This assumes that your search files will be

located in the root directory of your USB.

If however, you host your search files on a subdirectory, eg. a “search” folder off the root directory of the

USB, then you would need a base URL of “../” to refer to the linked files. Refer to the above section on

relative paths for more information on determining the correct relative path.

9.3 Where is the Program Data directory?

The Program Data directory is used to store files which are used by Zoom. This includes the plugins,

source code to the search scripts, the ZLANG language files, and some "extra" scripts for advanced

features.

Windows 7, Windows 10 and later

This would typically be the following:

C:\ProgramData\Wrensoft\Zoom Search Engine Indexer\

You may need to enable viewing of hidden directories to see the "ProgramData" folder - to do this, press

ALT-T in Explorer, select "Folder Options"->"View"->"Files and Folders"->"Hidden files and folders"-

>"Show hidden files and folders"

Older versions of Windows

On older versions of Windows, it may be stored in a folder like the following:

C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Application Data\Wrensoft\Zoom Search Engine

Indexer\

You may need to enable viewing of hidden directories to see the "Application Data" folder - to do this,

press ALT-T in Explorer, select "Folder Options"->"View"->"Files and Folders"->"Hidden files and

folders"->"Show hidden files and folders"

9.4 End User License Agreement (EULA)

PassMark

Software Pty Ltd ('PassMark')

End User Licence Agreement (‘EULA’)

IMPORTANT! PLEASE READ THE FOLLOWING TERMS AND CONDITIONS.

YOU, THE INSTALLER OF THIS SOFTWARE, AGREE THAT ALL OF THE TERMS AND CONDITIONS

DESCRIBED BELOW APPLY TO YOU AND ANYONE ELSE WHO USES THIS SOFTWARE, IF EITHER;

YOU CLICK THE “ACCEPT” BUTTON, OR YOU COPY, INSTALL, OR USE THIS COPY OF PASSMARK

SOFTWARE, OR YOU PERMIT OR ENABLE OTHERS TO COPY, INSTALL OR USE THIS PASSMARK

SOFTWARE.

IF YOU DO NOT AGREE TO BE BOUND BY THE TERMS AND CONDITIONS DESCRIBED BELOW,

PLEASE TERMINATE INSTALLATION IMMEDIATELY AND DO NOT USE THIS SOFTWARE.

SOFTWARE COVERED BY THIS LICENCE

Appendix 155

This licence agreement (“Agreement”) applies only to the version of the software package Zoom Search Engine

with which this Agreement is included. Different licence terms may apply to other software packages from

PassMark and licence terms for later versions of Zoom Search Engine may also be changed.

TITLE

PassMark

or its licensors own the Zoom Search Engine software package, including all materials included with the

package. PassMark owns the names and marks of ‘Zoom Search Engine’ under copyright, trademark and

intellectual property laws and all other applicable laws.

TERMINATION

This licence will terminate automatically if you fail to comply with any of the terms and conditions, limitations and

obligations described herein. On termination you must destroy all copies of the PassMark package and all other

materials downloaded as part of the package.

DISCLAIMER OF WARRANTY

PassMark disclaims any and all warranties express or implied, including any implied warranties as to

merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose. You acknowledge and agree that you had full opportunity to

test Zoom Search Engine before any live, public or production use, that you assume full responsibility for

selecting and using Zoom Search Engine and any files that may be created through the use of Zoom Search

Engine and that if you use Zoom Search Engine improperly or against instructions you can cause damage to your

files, software, data or business. The entire risk as to quality and performance of Zoom Search Engine is borne by

you. This disclaimer of warranty constitutes an essential part of the agreement. Some jurisdictions do allow

exclusions of an implied warranty, so this disclaimer may not apply to you and you may have other legal rights

that vary by jurisdiction.

LIMITATION OF LIABILITY

In no event shall PassMark, its officers, employees, affiliates, contractors, subsidiaries or parent organisations

be liable for any incidental, consequential, or punitive damages whatsoever relating to the use of Zoom Search

Engine, files created by Zoom Search Engine or your relationship with PassMark. Some jurisdictions do not

allow exclusion or limitation of liability for incidental or consequential damages, therefore the above limitation

may not apply to you.

HIGH RISK ACTIVITIES

The Zoom Search Engine is not fault-tolerant and is not designed or intended for use or resale as on-line control

equipment in hazardous environments requiring fail-safe performance, such as in the operation of nuclear

facilities, aircraft navigation or communication systems, air traffic control, direct life support machines, or

weapons systems, in which failure of Zoom Search Engine could lead directly to death, personal injury, or severe

physical or environmental damage (“High Risk Activities”). PassMark and its suppliers specifically disclaim any

express or implied warranty of fitness for High Risk Activities.

LINKS TO THIRD-PARTY SITES

PassMark is not responsible for the contents of any third-party sites or services, any links contained in third-

party sites or services, or any changes or updates to third-party sites or services. In the case where PassMark is

providing those links and access to third-party sites and services to you only as a convenience, and the inclusion

of any link of access does not imply an endorsement by PassMark of the third-party site of service.

ADDITIONAL SOFTWARE

This EULA applies to updates, supplements, add-on components or internet based services components of the

software that PassMark may provide to you or make available after the date you obtain your initial copy of the

software, unless they are accompanied by separate terms.

UPGRADES

To use software identified as an upgrade, you must first be licensed for the software identified by PassMark as

eligible for the upgrade. After installing the upgrade, you may no longer use the original software that formed the

basis of your upgrade eligibility, except as part of the upgraded software (unless otherwise authorised in writing

by PassMark).

Zoom Search Engine156

EXPORT RESTRICTIONS

You acknowledge that the software is subject to Australian export jurisdiction. You agree to comply with all

applicable international and nationals laws that apply to the software including destination restrictions issued by

Australia and other governments.

SOFTWARE TRANSFER

You may transfer your copy of the software to a different device. After the transfer, you must completely remove

the software from the former device (except for Free Edition).

Transfer to Third Party of Free Edition

The Free Edition of the software may be freely distributed provided that no fee is charged and the product is

distributed complete, intact and unedited by anyone other than PassMark.

Transfer to Third Party of other Editions (Professional & Enterprise)

This licence is granted exclusively to you, the original licensee, and therefore no right to resell, transfer, or re-

assign the license is granted. An exception may exist for manufacturers, distributors and dealers/resellers of

computer systems or computer software who have specifically negotiated for such an exception with PassMark to

resell a particular license key as part of an installed system or as an authorised reseller of the software on its own.

See www.zoomsearchengine.com for specifications of different editions.

SITE LICENSES

If this software is being installed as part of a Site License purchase, then following conditions apply:

The software may installed on an unlimited number of computer systems provided that:

1) The computers on which the software is installed belong to the one legal entity. Subsidiaries, parent

companies, brother/sister companies, affiliates and/or agents are not considered to be the same legal

entity and are therefore not entitled to have the software installed on their computer systems unless

specific permission is granted by PassMark.

2) The computer systems must all be situated in the one country. It is permissible that the computers be

located in different cities or states within the one country.

3) All such computers are the property of, or are being leased or borrowed by the licensee and are on the

premises of the licensee.

4) In the event that the computers are leased or borrowed, the software must be removed prior to the

computer being returned to its legal owner.

NO RENTAL/COMMERCIAL HOSTING

You may not rent, lease or lend the software.

LIMITATIONS ON REVERSE ENGINEERING, DECOMPILATION AND DISASSEMBLY

You may not reverse engineer, decompile, or disassemble the software, except and only to the extent that such

activity is expressly permitted by applicable law notwithstanding this limitation.

APPLICABLE LAW

This Agreement and any dispute relating to the ‘Software’ or to this Agreement shall be governed by the laws of

the state of New South Wales and the Commonwealth of Australia, without regard to any other country or state

choice of law rules. You agree and consent that jurisdiction and proper venue for all claims, actions and

proceedings of any kind relating to PassMark or the matters in this Agreement shall be exclusively in courts

located in NSW, Australia. If any part or provision of this Agreement is held to be unenforceable for any purpose,

including but not limited to public policy grounds, then you agree that they remainder of the Agreement shall be

fully enforceable as if the unenforced part or provision never existed. There are no third party beneficiaries or any

promises, obligations or representations made by PassMark herein.

Appendix 157

ENTIRE AGREEMENT

This Agreement (including any addendum or amendment to this EULA which is included with the software)

constitutes the entire Agreement between the parties with respect to the subject matter herein and supersedes all

previous and contemporaneous agreements, proposals and communications, written or oral between you and

PassMark. Waiver by PassMark of any violation of any provision of this Agreement shall not be deemed to waive

any further or future violation of the same or any other provision.

EULA0601128ZSE_ENG01

Zoom Search Engine158

Index

- . -

.DESC files

use offline .desc files when indexing remote files

.gif images 85

.jpg images 85

.png images 85

.result_image 84

.tiff images 85

- 2 -

2 GB files 96

- 4 -

4 GB memory 96

- 6 -

64-bit 96

- A -

accent characters 50

add list of new or updated pages 87

add start points to existing index 87

adding a search form to your website 126

adding folders 24

adding websites 21

additional start direcotires 24

additional URLs 21

advanced options 61

advanced spider URL options 21, 21

advanced start directory options 24

advanced start folder options 24

advantages over other solutions 8

ampersand 43

apostrophes 43

appearance of search page 119

authentication

cookie or session based authentication 47

HTTP authentication 47

automatic index 94

automatic login 47

automatically upload files at the end of indexing 64

auto-run options 93

avg unique words per page 25

avg words per page 25

- B -

bar charts 75

base URL 24

beep at the end of indexing 61

boolean AND (match all search words) 37

boolean OR (match any search words) 37

boosting words found in

filename 52

headings 52

meta description 52

meta keywords 52

title 52

broken link detection 92

broken link messages 27

- C -

cache 34

camera make 85

camera model 85

cascading style sheets 122

catch files not belonging to a category 66