| Enabling
Searches of Your Site
Searches
Enabling Indexed Searches
Search Rules and Interface
Editing the Default Stopwords List
Troubleshooting
Resources
Searches
In the
Control Panel > Customizing > General Settings
> Search, you can enable searches of the content on your
site, and/or searches of the web via Forum
One,
which lists and categorizes community sites.
You
can choose to put the search button on just the top-level page
or on all submerges as well. Users can search:
- Just
the current folder or discussion
- Your
whole site
- Forum
One
Users
are only be able to search areas to which they have access. Posts
from areas where they don't have access will not show up in their
search results.
To turn
off searches altogether, uncheck the boxes to remove the search
buttons from the top level and nested pages.
Enabling
Indexed Searches
Web
Crossing uses a mini-database called a search index to help make
the searches go quickly, even if your database grows very large.
Indexed
searching is on, by default, at installation. To turn it off,
go to: Control Panel > Customizing > General
Settings > Search.
The
master switch for creating (or re-creating) a search index is
at the bottom of the Control Panel at
Site management > Create search index. Web Crossing will create
(or re-create) the search index when you click this link. Search
index creation takes place in the background, meaning Web Crossing
will still serve pages while it's indexing. When the index is
done, the server will reload the page and tell you the index is
ready to use. You might want to periodically recreate your search
index because it makes a smaller file as it gets rid of information
about deleted posts.
If
a user clicks Search before you've created a search index,
Web Crossing will begin indexing, informing the user that indexing is
proceeding and s/he is currently unable to search the site. Search
index files can be quite large - 50% the size of your database
file or more.
Search
Rules and Interface
Web
Crossing search uses a number of rules in creating the index and
performing searches:
- The
word must be greater than 2 characters in length to be indexed.
- The
first two characters must be letters or the word won't be indexed.
- Words
with all caps are indexed separately from mixed/lower case words.
- All
words are converted to lower case except for words that are
all uppercase.
- HTML
tags aren't indexed.
-
Words that are longer than 48 characters are truncated.
-
The following suffixes are stripped: ers, ing, ied, ies, ed,
es, 's, er, e, s, y, '.
-
In order to save index space, a number of common words are not
indexed. The complete list is in a file called stopwords.default
in your webx directory. You can Edit this
list if you wish.
To
search for keywords or userIDs within your Web Crossing content,
type in one or more words separated by spaces. Web Crossing will
ignore upper or lower case and match all similar words with suffixes
and plurals, such as "s" and "ed." Only items matching
all the keywords will be returned.
Web
Crossing will return the title, author and date/time of each post
along with the first few words. The first 15 items will be displayed,
and if there are more, clicking a button at the bottom will display
the next 15.
If
you put in a keyword you know is there and Web Crossing returns
no matches, it might be too common a word or a word shorter than
two characters. In order to save indexing space a large number
of common
words are not indexed. Try again, using a more specific or
uncommon term, or a longer word.
Editing
the Default Stopwords List
Web
Crossing omits a number of common words in order to minimize the
size of the search index file and increase search speed. The list
is found in a text file called stopwords.default in your
webx directory on the web server. You can edit this list if you
wish. Here are the steps:
- Rename
the stopwords.default file to stopwords.
- Edit
it as you desire.
- Stop
and restart Web Crossing and log in as sysop.
- Go
to Control Panel > Site management
> Create Search Index to rebuild the search index
using your new edited file.
Troubleshooting
I'm
searching for a word I know is in the database, but it's not showing
up on search.
- Try
a more specific, less common word
- Be
sure your word is longer than two characters
- Edit
the stopwords file and re-index the site, and then try again
Resources
Sysop
Documentation
Web
Crossing FAQ
Sysop
Control Panel
- Customizing
- Site
Management
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