We want to help you understand what we are doing in this tutorial as well as why we are doing it. To do this you need to know the basics of what the Zoom Search Engine is, how it works and how it interacts with NetObjects Fusion.

Zoom is a website indexer that uses the power of your desktop PC to build indices of your website. These indices are then uploaded to your web server where they are used by PHP, ASP or CGI scripts to respond to search requests by visitors to your website. There is also a Javascript version that you can use when publishing to a CDROM.

Zoom examines your website content after it has been published in Local mode or to the Internet.

Hint:  If all of your website content is generated from NetObjects Fusion it is faster and easier to let Zoom build the indexes in Offline Mode after you do a Local Publish.

These indices are highly optimized for search speed and for displaying the search results in a format that you want to see. Other settings (such as highlighting search terms in the results or displaying the search time) are all set by you in the desktop component and stored in a different configuration file for each website (we show you how).

After Zoom finishes the indexing process it creates a group of small data and code files that need to be uploaded to your website.  These files are manually published using the binary mode of any FTP program.

Note: It is our understanding that a version of Zoom is being developed that will have (among other new features) a built-in FTP client. This will greatly simplify the process.

Based on the PHP version of Zoom

This Zoom search used in this tutorial is built using the PHP version. You may need to adapt this tutorial for other versions of the Zoom Engine. Please see the the Zoom documentation for details.

Web Publishing by NOF Structure

This tutorial is based on publishing your  website in the standard NOF Structure format so the files get uploaded to the \html directory on our web server.  If you publish Flat or by Asset you may need to adapt this tutorial to your setup.

Static Website Indexing

Anytime you have made substantial changes to your content and republished your website you will need to use Zoom to reindex your website.  Then you need to upload the Zoom files again if you want the new content to be included in the search results. 

Avoid Maximum Compression in NOF!

Zoom must “reuse” the HTML template file created with NOF for your search results page.  Turn OFF maximum compression in NOF to avoid corruption errors!