Zoomwords and Phrases

[Fork]

In a reply to a 2005 post, Ray said:

The keywords are indexed just like page content, so you can have something like "test, car, dog, pressure valve, pressure transmitter" and the "pressure valve" would match an exact phrase search. There is no boolean logic operators that is applicable for the keywords, or a limit on the number of keywords.

In his example, pressure valve and pressure transmitter are separated by commas, thus they are phrases and would be found by exact phrase searches. But would the word pressure by itself be covered by this inclusion or would it need to be added to the list for Zoomwords by itself, i.e. "test, car, dog, pressure valve, pressure transmitter, pressure."

In my case, with a recipe site, the keywords "China, Chinese recipes" might be my Zoomwords. But because the word recipe appears thousands of times throughout the site, I don't want the page with this meta tag to come up for just "recipe" -- only if there is a search for "Chinese recipe". But if someone searches for Chinese, then I want this page to be a result for the search.

[Ray]

The list of ZOOMWORDS behave just like normal text that appear on the page. So there is no distinction to single words or phrases, and the use of commas do not serve any functional purpose.

So in the example above, the ZOOMWORDS of "test, car, dog, pressure valve, pressure transmitter" would allow the word "pressure" to be indexed twice. It does not need a separate single entry.

In my case, with a recipe site, the keywords "China, Chinese recipes" might be my Zoomwords. But because the word recipe appears thousands of times throughout the site, I don't want the page with this meta tag to come up for just "recipe" -- only if there is a search for "Chinese recipe". But if someone searches for Chinese, then I want this page to be a result for the search.

First of all, you might want to look at the new "Recommended Links" feature introduced in V5:
http://www.wrensoft.com/zoom/feature...commendedlinks

This allows you to specify a phrase to associate with a page, so that when one searches for "chinese recipes" for example, they will get the recommended page(s) at the very top of the results. This feature works with the distinction that if you have an entry for a phrase, it will not match the individual word, so a search for "recipes" will not yield the same recommended link.

So you could create a recommended link for "chinese recipes" and another for "chinese" and have them both go to the same page.

Now if you still wish to pursue the use of ZOOMWORDS for your purpose, note that the ZOOMWORDS only increase (or add) the occurances of words on a page without requiring changes to the visible content of the page. This means that while you may have the word "recipe" included in the ZOOMWORDS, the fact that the word also appears, as you say, on many other pages, probably many more times, mean that this should not be of great consequence. It means that your "chinese recipe" page will be in the result set in a search for "recipe", but it should not be the top result (unless of course, you have "chinese recipe" mentioned many times more than any other pages which contain the word "recipe"). All of this would also vary depending on your weighting factors setup in Zoom for titles, headings, etc.

[Fork]

Maybe I missed it in the manual, but how does recommended links work with plurals and other modifiers, like apostrophes and capitalization?

Will "chinese recipe" work for "chinese recipes"?

Will "st. patrick's day" equal "St Patrick Day"?

[Ray]

Capitalization is not an issue. Upper and lower case differences are ignored, and treated the same throughout the search engine (unless you turn it off).

There is currently no automatic handling of plurals and apostrophe characters however. This can not be easily done in many cases, due to our support of a wide range of languages and not just English.

So no, a recommended link for "chinese recipe" will not match "chinese recipes". But you can create two recommended links, one for each query if required. Similarly, with "st. patrick's day" and "st patrick day".

[Fork]

Thanks for the prompt answers.

Searching the forum I found the "maximum number of links to display" information but I didn't find the maximum number of total recommended links one can import or add. I can foresee possibly a hundred or more for my site in order to cover the additional ones for plurals, etc.

[Ray]

There is no fixed limit for the number of recommended links you can have. Several hundred should not be a problem, but let us know if you come across any issues.

[Fork]

Only issue with recommended links today has been the phrase St. Patrick's Day and its variations.

I added several variations in lower case, with apostrophe and without.

If I search for St. Patrick's with or without the period after St. I get a search result without any recommended link (the target page comes up 2nd).

The search result states "Search results for: st patrick's" without the period.

Here are the entries in ZOOM's recommended link section:

st. patrick|http//:www.globalgourmet.com/food/special/st-patrick/|St. Patrick's Day Holiday Handbook|Global Gourmet's main page for St. Patrick's Day celebrations, including links to Irish recipes, cookbooks, background and more.
st. patrick's day|http//:www.globalgourmet.com/food/special/st-patrick/|St. Patrick's Day Holiday Handbook|Global Gourmet's main page for St. Patrick's Day celebrations, including links to Irish recipes, cookbooks, background and more.
st. patricks day|http//:www.globalgourmet.com/food/special/st-patrick/|St. Patrick's Day Holiday Handbook|Global Gourmet's main page for St. Patrick's Day celebrations, including links to Irish recipes, cookbooks, background and more.
st. patrick's day|http://www.globalgourmet.com/destinations/ireland/|Ireland|Global Gourmet's main page for Ireland and Irish recipes, including background on Ireland, Irish recipes and cookbooks, customs and more.

There are 55 entries and the st. patrick links are near the end. Other recommended links like chinese recipes appear to work as advertised.

One other thing: I have the dots rule checked under indexing options.

[Ray]

The reason is because Zoom strips punctuation characters in a search query, if it is not followed by a character (eg. "St." in this case, would be treated as "St"). The index word join characters only apply when the punctuation character is between two valid characters, eg. "st.s"

So if you have a single recommended link for "st patrick's day" - it will actually match both "st patrick's day" and "st. patrick's day".

But perhaps we need to add some warning when people create recommended links with punctuation characters at the end of words (as they essentially can not be matched). We'll make note of this.

[Fork]

What is the relationship between synonyms and recommended links?

If I have a synonym like this: st patrick = st patricks

Will a recommended link for st patricks also find st patrick?

I experimented and it doesn't appear to work, but I may not have it set up right, or synonyms don't work with recommended links the way one might expect.

[Ray]

Synonyms do not currently apply to recommended links.

Also, you can not specify a phrase as a synonym - ie. you can not specify "st patrick" as a synonym entry. A synonym has to be a single word. A warning/error message was added to the latest build which prevents users from entering spaces in a synonym entry.