Hello Joe and Lee and all those other dotnetnukers who have been aggrivated with the standard search engine that comes prepackaged with DNN.

A while back you guys asked me to let you know if and when I came up with a suitable alternative to DNN Search module and I think I have found it.  The answer is Zoom search engine.  You can check out a tutorial for it at the following address:

http://www.wrensoft.com/zoom/suppor...l_dnn.html

Apparently unlike the other search engine solutions this one utilizes the local computer and depends on its resources (not the web server's) to crawl your online web site weather it be DNN or some other.  Also you can index a cd you may have made for disk distribution but you have a lot of options with this search engine.

You can do everything from skip specific pages you don't want, to generating logs of search tactics to find out what your visitors are typing in as search words so you can learn how effective your internal search methods are.

You can also search things like doc files, ppt, pdf, etc... as well as coorect spellings of closely spelled words to the correct word.  So you could put the word "hello as the real word and put a misspelling of helo as a map to the hello word. 

There is also features such as highlighting the searched word and jumpting right to that word.  You can organize your searches in categories and their is so much more to this piece of software.

For any serious web site I would opt for the profressional version.  If you are a starter site that has 50 pages or less you can get the free version but this version is very limited in what it can index (i.e. file types) as well as other customizations only available in the professional or enterprise versions.

The Professional version is only like $99 and the enterprise is $299.  The Professional will let you crawl up to 200,000 pages and index up to 500,000 unique words per time you index the site. 

The enterprise version has no limitation on the number of words or pages the spider will crawl.

At any rate I encourage you to give it a look.  If you want I would encouarge you to jump to a website I have been working on that uses DNN with this search engine and give it a test run.

The site is www.berkshires.org

Please note that when you go to test it out you must click the submit button after you have finished typing the word you would like to search.  If you simply hit enter it will not work.  Not quite sure why yet might be do to the fact I have no form tag but given my design and where I needed to locate the search box a form tab for some reason in DNN just broke up my whole page so I had to opt to use simply input fields with a button for submit opposed to using the keyword submit since I wasn't calling any form method but simply taking you to the page I created in DNN for searching.

Try typing words like berkshires, fishing, recreation, etc... give it a whirl and see if you like how it seems to function on my site.  I am not using any fancy customizations or highlighting emphesis for search words at this time but as I stated earlier this is available and down the line on this site I proably will implement that feature of Zoom search.  But of all the solutions I looked at thus far this one is by far the best as it does not strain the web server for indexing which is good.  True you must periodically open up the software and reindex your site manually which can be a pain but its far better than other search solutions out their for DNN

Cheers,

Bo

Thanks for the information!

as a follow up to this discovery I would like to inform you that I was able to locate the fix for the enter key issue. I guess I didn't read far enough down on the zoom search tutorial and the tech support people in Australia alerted me of this fact so for your info if you wish to pursue this option here is a snippet from that tutorial in regards to the use of the enter key

Using the Enter key with your search form
As explained in the section above ("Adding search boxes to your other web pages"), you will need to add special HTML in order to add a search box to the other DNN pages of your site. The HTML provided in the above section does not accept the Enter key on your keyboard. This is to avoid disturbing any other form elements on your page which might require/expect the Enter key.

However, if you wish to make it so that the Enter key will submit the query in the search box, then you should replace this line in the abovementioned HTML:



With the following:

[script removed]