Resources - Zoom Search Engine Tutorials - Getting Started
When you first launch Zoom Search Engine a Wizard window pops up in front of the main program window, I prefer to work from the main window rather than the wizard so this is how the tutorials are all based. Also working in spider mode rather than offline mode.
Tip:
When you have entered in your website details and settings, these can be saved by going to 'File' on the menu bar and selecting 'Save'. Your configurations are saved in a file with the extension .zcfg and are loaded next time you start Zoom.
Sections Explained
Start Spider from this URL
This is fairly self explanatory, meaning that you enter the url of your website including the http:// in front of your address.
The 'More' button next to the start spider url box allows more advanced settings: Here you can add additional website URLs to be indexed at the same time. Meaning that your website user will be able to search content from 2 or more websites, or search content which is not linked to from the main part of the website.
By selecting one of the URL's and clicking on edit you will open up the window shown above. Here specifications can be set for each URL being indexed, the choices are as follows:
- Index page and follow internal links
- Index page and follow internal and external links
- Index single page only
- Follow links only
Base URL
This is the URL where your website is published. By default it is the same as your 'Start Spider' url, if you need to over ride this it can be done so by clicking on the 'more' button and editing from there.
Output Directory
This is the local directory where the files produced by Zoom will be stored.
Platform
Zoom supports a range of server side scripting languages: php, asp, or cgi. It also has the ability to produce a client side search by using javascript.
Generally for website use it's best to use one of the server side languages, which one you chose is dependant on which one your website hosting company supports.
If your host supports none of the server side languages you can then use javascript which has slightly more limitations than the server side languages, or perhaps you should consider changing hosts!
Configure
Clicking on the configure button opens up the configure panel which has a multitude of tabs available to fine tune your search results and spider settings. For more information on this panel please see the tutorials on Configuration.
Verbose
Having this turned on displays a detailed description of files missed and files indexed during the indexing process, these messages are displayed in the window on the right. This is a handy feature for identifying if any of your files aren't indexed.
Start Indexing
Begins the indexing process! For more information on this process and uploading your files please visit the tutorial Indexing and Uploading.