Pre-Sales Question Does it allow for multiple site crawling?

[Anonymous]

I have scanned the user pdf, the forums and the FAQs for this answer and I have gotten glimpses of the possiblity.

What I like to know is:
1) Can the program scan external sites? As well as my local site? I want to include certain selected sites that I think are good.
2) Can I separate those sites out? Services, Places, Products, ect
* I saw the category area but am not quite sure how I would do this
with external sites.
3) Is there a way to give priority to my local site over the external sites?
4) Evenutally I want to implement like google a featured click. Is possible that I can have two search indexes for one search? One for a normal search and one for featured listing search. And then get back the results from the cgi and use it in an asp script to display the feature search result at the top with the normal search result at the bottom.
5) Does it track howmany times a link was displayed in the search result list?

I know alot of questions. But I figure I ask before playing. Hoping you might lend a hand and determining if I would be wasting my time or if I could actually make it work with this software.

Yours in deepest gratitude,

Angela Law

[David]

Here are brief answers let me know of you need more detail.

1) Yes. See this FAQ question.
Q. How do I index multiple web sites as one site?

2) Yes categories can be used with external sites. It might take you some time to come up with a good set of patterns for the sites concerned however.

3) Yes. Use the Zoom ZOOMPAGEBOOST tag on your site. See section 2.3.5, "Indexing options" of the users guide.

4) No, the scripts will only search a single set of index files. If you want advertising on your pages you need to build your advertising solution around Zoom. You can wrap the Zoom CGI in ASP however.

5) Zoom can log searches made, but it doesn't log the full page of search results. See,
http://www.wrensoft.com/zoom/screen7.html
http://www.wrensoft.com/zoom/screen8.html
The log would be huge if we started logging the search results.

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David

[Anonymous]

Hi David,

Thanks so much for getting back to me. I truly appreciate it.

I don't think I probalby explained myself well. I would like the external sites to all be in one .dat file with the ability to have categories.

So say someone comes up and searches my site for Buddhism

They could choose to search products, places, people, ect... individually or they could choose to search them ALL.

So I guess the first question and important question is:

Can I group external sites together in the same dat files system? Handle Multiple websites in *One* Indexing

When I play around with it, it seems that it goes to the url and scans/creates the .dat brand new file each time you click Start indexing.

That is the biggie I guess for me

Again I really appreciate you time in answering these questions :^)

Many Thanks,

Angela

[Anonymous]

I should also add

I thought of one way to get around the system except I was worried if it actually would rank the page.

That is to have a html page that had all the external urls on it. Then index that with it dirlling down on the links.

Your thoughts on whether or not the initial url link page would show up in the search engine?

Have a terrific day!

Angela

[David]

Can I group external sites together in the same dat files system? Handle Multiple websites in *One* Indexing

Yes. By the way, this question was already answered in my first post.
Q. How do I index multiple web sites as one site?

I thought of one way to get around the system.

There is no need to 'get around' the system. You just need to read the instructions above.

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David

[Anonymous]

Thank you

You know I looked at the question below it...When the page pulled up it put the question right at the top of my browser I didn't notice it.

Instead I read the

<<How do I setup a search page for different categories/parts of a website? Or for multiple domains?>>

Since it had the word multiple domains in the title I thought that was the answer you were giving me, which I couldn't see how that would work.

Yours in deepest gratitude,

Angela Law