Zoom Search Engine for hotel search engine?

[fransvoorne]

Hello,

I'm currently investigating new IT solutions for a hotel booking website. The current search engine works, but it takes over 30 seconds to show the results. Would it be possible to adapt V7 to allow for hotel searching? (or would the amount of customisation make it impossible). (FYI: The website concerned is www.hotelgift.com) My apologies if it's a newbie question, I'm only used to XML communication.

Thank you,
Kind regards,

Frans Voorne

[Ray]

It seems to me that the website in question has a custom database search function. It very likely has all this data stored in a SQL database (I'm not sure who or how it is updated, and whether this is efficient or not), and it performs a search via SQL queries based on the data fields, etc.

While Zoom has a feature to emulate this (via the Custom Meta Fields feature) for websites which are not built on content stored in a database, and you could potentially achieve similar queries and search criteria.

But frankly, given that your website content is already stored within the database, it makes more sense to make direct database queries (as your website's search function currently does). Zoom is more designed for the (more difficult) task of indexing and searching web pages, PDF documents, spreadsheets and such.

If you are looking to improve the search speed of your existing function, you would do better to hire an experienced programmer to look at your existing search function and see what optimizations can be made.