The following is a brief list of the basic features provided by Zoom,
• | Easy to use and user friendly indexer application which runs from your very desktop (or Windows based web server) and allows you to configure all elements of the search engine. |
• | Spider indexing mode allows websites hosted on a web server to be scanned remotely, and index both dynamically generated web sites as well as static content. Supports multi-threading for super fast spider crawling. |
• | Offline indexing mode available for indexing local web pages, with only static content for speed and convenience. |
• | Powerful search syntax allowing for wildcard matches (eg. "zo?m", "*zoom*"), exclusion/negative searches, exact phrases*, Boolean AND/OR, and more. |
• | "Google-like" context search results shows the matched word and its surrounding context. |
• | Highlight words found in search results. |
• | Sort search results by date or relevance. |
• | Provide users with spelling suggestions when few results are found. |
• | You can specify synonyms, variations of words, common misspellings, etc. and allow you to map them to an equivalent word in the index. |
• | Weighting and boosting options allow you to increase or decrease the importance of text (found in headings, or titles, etc.) and particular pages, giving you greater control over which page gets higher priority in the search results. |
• | Flexible indexing options allow you to select exactly what you want to index, from title of page, page content, to Meta author, and filename. |
• | Customizable search page appearance with HTML and CSS templates. |
• | Categories option allows you to group files together, and provide a drop-down or checkbox of categories to restrict your searches to. |
• | Authentication support for indexing secure websites in spider mode |
• | Log user searches performed on your website |
• | Built-in FTP uploading: Zoom can upload your search files to the web server for you. |
• | Built-in scheduling: Schedule Zoom to automatically index or generate reports for your site. |
• | International language support (various charset support, Unicode/UTF-8, accent/diacritic options, localized search pages, translatable output, and more) |
• | Advanced HTML document parsing, indexing only the content to your website and avoiding various scripting code from being mixed up with the text of the document. |
• | Prevent indexing pages with identical content with CRC signatures. |
• | Supports cookies and cache used by Windows and Internet Explorer. |
• | Supports HTML character entities and numeric entities. Eg. &#accute; á |
• | Configuration files allows you to manage multiple search engines with ease. |
*Not available in Free Edition
Advanced features include,
• | Incremental indexing:
Update or add new pages to your index without needing to perform a full re-index. Available for spider mode indexing and PHP, ASP and CGI platforms only. See "Incremental indexing" for more information. |
• | Icons and thumbnails:
This feature allows you to configure images (such as icons and thumbnails) to appear alongside your search results. Combined with the image indexing option, you can implement image searching capabilities to your website. Note that Zoom does not generate thumbnails or icon images and you must specify the appropriate paths and filenames to these files. See the "Icons and thumbnails" chapter for more information. |
• | Image indexing (JPG, GIF, PNG, TIFF):
With the use of our new image plugin, you can now index and search image files. Not available in Free Edition. See "Image indexing" for more information. |
• | Recommended links:
Add pages and links to appear at the top of your search results when a user searches for certain keywords. This allows you to specify the best results for certain searches, or gives you the ability to setup listings for your sponsors if you so desire. See "Recommended links" for more information. |
• | Content filtering:
Selectively include or exclude pages from being indexed depending on keywords found (or not found) in the content of the file. See "Content filtering" for more information. |
• | Broken link detection:
Find broken links (links to mistyped URLs or missing pages returning 404 errors) on your website while indexing. See "Broken link detection" for more information. |
• | Sitemap generator (Yahoo™ and Google™ Sitemap compatible):
Generate a sitemap for your site at the same time as your index! This allows you to create sitemap files to submit to Internet-wide search engines such as Google and Yahoo to help them find all the pages on your site that their spiders may otherwise be incapable of finding. See "Sitemaps" for more information. |
• | Indexing enormous sites:
We have made some significant optimizing which has led to an overhaul of the index structure and design, consequently allowing us to index and search a much larger amount of data than before. Memory usage has been reduced by more than half in most cases, and this includes all the new features and functionalities which we have added! We have also implemented a number of new techniques which allow us to index much larger sets of data than your physical memory would allow. This includes the ability to flush and merge index data as it is progressively written to disk. The indexing capability of the engine now exceeds a million average web pages, and we have introduced the Enterprise Edition for users who have such enormous search requirements. |
• | Charset by page:
Zoom will now use the charset specified in the page's meta tag or the HTTP header sent by the server when indexing files. Previously, the Indexer would always expect content to be delivered in the same charset specified in the Zoom configuration window (one charset per session). This means that you can now index various web pages (or websites) which employ different character sets or encoding. The indexed content will then be converted to the encoding selected in the configuration window, and your search page will use the same encoding. |
• | Improved categories:
We have listened to our users feedback and given our category feature an overhaul with some much requested options. These include: allowing files to belong to multiple categories, being able to search for multiple categories, wildcard category match patterns, the option to disable the default/catch-all category, and the use of a ZOOMCATEGORY meta tag to associate a file with a category manually. See "Categories" for more information. |
• | XML/RSS (OpenSearch compatible) output:
Option to display search results in OpenSearch compatible XML/RSS output. Allows you to post-process the search results via your own scripts, or provide RSS feeds for end-users, as well as the myriad of OpenSearch solutions becoming available online. See "XML/RSS output" for more information. |
• | Adding meta data to remote files:
You can now override incorrect meta data on remotely hosted sites (which you may not be able to change, or you do not wish to host .desc files on) by allowing Zoom to look for their corresponding .desc files in a local folder when spidering a remote website. See "Scan options" for more information. |
• | Highlighting words in PDF files:
You can enable this option to allow searched words to be highlighted within PDF documents when they are opened in Acrobat Reader 7.0 or later. See "Configuring a plugin" for more information. |
• | Limit pages per start point:
You can now restrict the number of pages to be indexed from a specific start point (and have different limits per start point). See "Start spider URL" for more information. |
• | MP3 audio/music file indexing:
New plugin for indexing and searching meta data within MP3 files such as Title, Artist, Album, Duration and more. |
• | AutoCAD file indexing (DWF) |
• | Indexing filenames of recognized binary files (EXE, WMV, ... etc.) |
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