Improvements to indexing and searching

Over the past few months we have been working through our "would be nice" list of improvements. Among the recent changes to the indexer and search engine are:

• Better support for common HTML mistakes, such as unterminated tags and misformated date meta tags.
• Improved date sorting. Previously, documents older than a few years were grouped together.
• Expanded support for structured data, including tel: and mailto: protocols.
• Further refinement of the weighting function to generate more relevant result lists.

We have also been enhancing the tools for visualizing the contents of an index. To see the tools available, log in to the Blossom site and look for the Actions section at the bottom of the Settings page.

Enhanced semantic entities

We have completed a significant upgrade of processing for semantic entities. Semantic entities are items like phone numbers and prices. The basic facility allows queries to match patterns of text that represent instances of the entity. For example, the query "product price", besides matching sentences containing the words "product" and "price", also matches sentences containing "product" and an instance of a price such as "$25". Currently supported entities are: phone numbers, email addresses, postal codes, prices, and times of day.

Are there entities you would like to see added? Send suggestions to Blossom Support.