Aspect Search Features
The following section details some of the key features of our hosted search solution.
We will continually add new features to ensure our solution is the best value and feature rich available.
We would appreciate your feature request ideas.
We have produced a feature comparison with Google's custom search for business (CSBE)
to give you an idea how Aspect Search compares with its competition.
Web Crawler
Our search robot (spider) will index all publicly available documents by following internal links
found on your site. As documents are processed, a list of words (catalog) are built for storing in
the final index. This index will be used to search for documents for all future search requests, until the next index is complete.
Our search robot has the following features:
- Index content from html, text, xml and pdf documents
- Ignore documents and folders using your sites robots.txt
- Ignore regions within a document using the syntax <!--NOINDEX--> Do not index <!--/NOINDEX-->
- User defined Stop Words to exclude words from your index
- User defined Go Words to force words to be added to your index
- Process links that may not be publicly visible using a sitemap
- Automatic discovery of your sitemap from the robots.txt file
- Uses Stemming technology to help broaden a users search
- User defined keyword hints using the meta keywords tag
- Extended robots.txt protocol to enable URL patterns to restrict access to areas on your site
Intelligent Search Algorithm
Our search algorithm has been based upon well known SEO techniques. By implementing these techniques
on your own site will not only improve the search experience for visitors, but will also
help your site rank in the other major search engines.
Our support staff are available for a health check of your initial index. We can help you identify areas to improve
the accuracy of the search index.
- Ranking algorithm follows tried and tested SEO techniques
- Different weights can be applied to various ranking factors to suit your needs
- The algorithm is constantly changing to improve its accuracy and efficiency
Search Options
We offer three options for you to query data in your search index. Choosing from the options will depend on your requirements
and the resources you have access to. Please feel free to contact us if you need clarification
on any of these options.
Once you have signed-up and your membership confirmed, the code and implementation details for each of these options
will be available to you from the client section of this site.
Search by Partition
You can segment portions of your website to allow a user to restrict their search. For example, you can restrict a users
search to just the Support area of your site. This can improve the relevancy of the users search by only searching
documents within the area of interest.
Search Results Design
Our support will help you create and customize a template to suit your needs.
- The content and layout of the results template are fully customizable
- A CSS style sheet gives you complete control over the design of the results
- The designs you choose are fully compatible across both search page hosting options
Word Suggestion on Misspelled Words
If a word from a users search cannot be found on any indexed page, we will run this word through our spell check process.
The most relevant word from this match will be offered to the user as a suggestion.
Inject Custom Data Into Search Results
For all the pages we index, we can also capture additional meta data about the content on the page.
This allows you to display additional information on a search result, such as a product photo, pricing etc.
Search Request Reports
We have a number of standard reports available. Please contact us if you have any additional requirements for reporting
or analyzing the data we capture.
- View what search terms are being used for a specific time period. Track trends of your visitors and help identify areas of improvement.
- Identify the most popular terms. Find out what areas on your site are most popular.
- Identify searches made with no documents matched. Add new sections or content to your site you know your visitors are looking for.