Improve Your Search!

We recently completed a review of how our clients are using the features of the Blossom search service. To our surprise, many sites use very little of the search engine's capabilities. So, we have created a new program called "Improve your search!" where a Blossom engineer makes suggestions to improve the search experience on your website.

The suggestions are available through the "Summary" tab of your Search Activity report. You can also get them by logging on to www.blossom.com and following the link "Retrieve suggestions for an index".

Slider to Sort by Relevance versus Date

We invite you to test and comment on a new feature of the search output, a slider bar that allows searchers to change the importance of age and relevance in ordering search results. To try it out, add "/slider" to the ACTION URL in your search form.

Moving the slider changes the relative importance of document age and relevance. For example, consider searching for a press release about "fireworks". A search based just on relevance might pull up old press releases that contain a lot about fireworks before a recent release that just mentions fireworks. A search just based on document age might pull up recent press releases having little to do with fireworks before a slightly older release with more about fireworks. Adjusting the slider to get a mixture of age and relevance allows a searcher to control how important age is versus relevance.

Try it out and let us know what you think.

Enhancements to Search Results

Over the past couple of weeks we have been enhancing the search engine to improve the search results. Improvements have been in two areas:

• Better handling of navigation text--Navigation text is tricky because it often appears on many pages. The index now treats most navigation text as though it were actually on the page being linked to.
• Better handling of duplicate pages--The search engine now looks at the actual search snippet instead of the whole page. Duplicate snippets are now eliminated.

Let us know how you like the changes. We will be tuning the results based on feedback.

Old Search Activity Reports now available

You can now download old Search Activity Reports from the Blossom website. Past reports are accessible from the Download tab of the current report. To retrieve an old report:

• Log on to your account at Blossom.com.
• Follow the link "Retrieve a Search Activity Report for an index".
• Select the index to get the current report.
• Choose the "Download" tab.

You will see a list of the archived reports by week.

Synonym feature enhanced

Does your site use acronyms or are there specialized terms that have multple synonyms? The enhanced synonym feature makes it easy to create related-search suggestions for your visitors. For example, if you create "citation" as a synonym for "ticket", then a search for "parking ticket" will suggest a related search of "parking citation" and a search for "parking citation" will suggest "parking ticket".

Synonyms can be phrases as well. With "IT" as a synonym for "information technology", a search for "IT department" will suggest "information technology department". To read more about synonyms, see the Search Guide section on Search Options.

Domain names added to Activity Report

The Search Activity report for an index includes the IP addresses from which searches originated. In the dynamic activity reports, the domain name is now shown for most IP addresses. The domain name is retrieved using the Domain Name Service (DNS). Not all IP addresses have an associated domain name; the domain for those addresses is displayed as "<unknown>".

Most Popular Searches

You can now display the most popular searches made on your search index. The new "gethistory" command returns a table of up to 100 search terms. (Twenty is the default, but there is an option to set the number displayed.) For more details, see the Search Guide section on Activity Reports.