Incremental Indexing

[burrellbloke]

I am currently using v4.2 on my site Criminal Solicitor Dot Net.
http://www.criminalsolicitor.net/

I have Zoom set up to fully reindex my site every 7 days as I find that I simply use up too much bandwidth if Zoom reindexes at any shorter interval of 7 days.

My site contains a mixture of material and a forum. Generally speaking the scripts on my site have been edited to contain many start and stop tags so that Zoom avoids indexing a lot of dyanamic content that is not relevant to search results, such as posters signatures and the members that have logged in to the site, etc., etc.

I am interested in the concept of incremental indexing but I am not sure whether it would work on a site such as mine. If v5 was to incrementally index this forum would it be successful and what would be the recommened time interval suggested before a full reindex was necessary?

[Ray]

Incremental indexing consists of several different options.

First is "Incremental Update". This uses file sizes and the last-modified time to determine if a file needs to be re-indexed. This is unlikely to work on your forum because most forums do not offer a last-modified time which reflects the latest post made to that thread. Usually it will just tell the client that every page is new/different, which will not work well for this approach.

"Add start points (or domains) to existing index" obviously doesn't apply here as the new pages on your site would not be new domains nor start points.

"Add a list of new or updated pages" is the only other option and this requires that you actually know a list of new pages which need to be updated. Now, this would only be possible if your website scripts are coded to keep track of this and report a comprehensive list of URL's that need to be updated or added to the index. Without this facility, it would also not be practical.

As to how often you would need to re-index, this would depend on whether or not there are mostly updated pages or new pages. If they are mostly new pages, then you would not need to do a full re-index very often. But if you are mostly handling updated pages (pages which are already in the index but need to be re-indexed), then you would need to do this more often. More of this explained in the Users Guide.