Search page

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These are options specific to changing the appearance, or behaviour of the search page from which searches are entered and results are shown.

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.

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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.?"

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 "wrensoft zoom" (with double quotes) will not match "zoom wrensoft" or "wrensoft something zoom").

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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 To 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.

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 “Powered by Zoom Search Engine” line at the bottom of each search page.