By default, the Blossom spider looks for a sitemap.xml file in each folder it processes. (If desired, this behavior can be turned off from the Search Configuration page.) Recently we discovered that at least one sitemap generator creates a file header that caused our sitemap parser to fail. As a result, some sitemaps were not followed.
The latest spider update has fixed this problem, allowing more sitemaps to be read. Your indexes may now include files that previously were not found.
Work has begun on upgrading the back-end infrastructure supporting Blossom Search, including the customer-facing portal for managing account information and search engine configuration. We will be adding more functionality to the portal, such as a facility for accessing accounting documents and more insight into the contents and use of a search index. Please send suggestions to support@blossoft.com for features you'd like to see.
You may have noticed that the number of searches reported in your weekly search report has gone down, perhaps dramatically. We have recently changed the reporting system to ignore searches from known robots.
Robots have long dominated overall web traffic. As a result of their increased sophistication, we've seen an increase in the number of searches carried out by robots. These robot searches skew the search data, making it harder to see just what your (human) visitors are searching for. On your search report the data no longer includes searches from known robots (and you will see the number of robot search that were ignored).
The appearance of search engine output can be controlled in a variety of ways. The simplest is to use parameters in the search URL, for example to control whether the size or date of a matched page is shown. By using a style sheet you can get control over the fonts, colors, and spacing of the text in the search output. Each component of the output is surrounded by CSS classes. Documentation for using CSS is in the Search Guide.
The next version of the search engine contains a few new classes to control the search output:
Blossom_DocBlock: A div that surrounds all of the output for each document matched by a query. Use this to control block-level behavior such as shading, hovering, and selecting.
Blossom_DocType: If a document is not HTML, then an indicator of the document type is added to the title. This class controls the style of the indicator.
Blossom_MoreButtons: Links for the "next" and "previous" pages of search results are displayed when the "more" option is used. This style controls the format of the link text.
Blossom_SearchForm: A div containing the search-again forms.
You can access the new version of the search engine by using "nquery" in place of "query" in your search URL. Use nquery just for testing, as it changes regularly as we test new search engine features. The changes will migrate to the production search engine, "query", in early November.
Update. These features went live on 11/9/2020.
We have taken this opportunity to distribute functionality across a few domains. This improves security and makes the search engine more resistant to attack. Blossom now uses these domain names: