Upgrade to search software and hardware

 Over the next month the Blossom search server will be migrating to more modern hardware and system software. The changes should be transparent unless you have hard-coded Blossom's IP address anyplace in your system. The result should be better performance and better security. The servers will continue to hosted by Amazon AWS.

In addition to system upgrades, the search software itself will be upgraded. In the past the programs were a mixture of 32 and 64-bit. Moving forward, everything will be 64-bit running on Amazon Linux 2. During this testing period you will see more traffic from Blossom spiders as the new system runs in parallel with the old. The target date for completion is early January.

UPDATE. As of December 26, we have begun the process of moving indexes to the upgraded system. During the week of the 26th, index updates and weekly search reports will be delayed as they are checked for correctness. All indexes should be moved before Jan 1. Please report any anomalies you see to support@blossoft.com.

Expanded sitemap processing

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.

Upgrade to back-end infrastructure

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.

Robot searches removed from search report

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).

New CSS classes to control search engine output

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. 

New domain names

Blossom Software has used the domain blossom.com since its founding in 1999. During that time we have often received offers to purchase the name. Recently, the company received an offer that could not be refused.

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:

• BlossomSoftware.net for the Blossom Software website. Go here to access your Search Configuration page.
• searchBlossom.com for the Blossom search engine. Use this on your website to invoke the search engine. This domain works for both http and https access.
• blossoft.com for email. For example, use support@blossoft.com to email Blossom Support.

The most important of these changes is the use of searchBlossom.com, as it impacts your search form. search.blossom.com and ssearch.blossom.com will continue to work for a while, but they will eventually be dropped.

First Notice! New URL to access search engine

We have unified access to the search engine for http and https access. Previously, if you used "http://" to call search, you used the server "search.blossom.com". For "https://" you used "ssearch.blossom.com". Using the two servers prevented mixed-content warnings from browsers.

The latest update of the search server can handle both protocols, so two servers are no longer required. Access the new server at searchBlossom.com. Please change your search engine access URLs as follows:

Old: http://search.blossom.com

New: http://searchblossom.com

Old: https://ssearch.blossom.com

New: https://searchblossom.com

This change also affects access to search engine support for popup results:

Old: https://ssearch.blossom.com/search_modal.js

New: https://searchBlossom.com/search_modal.js

Old: https://ssearch.blossom.com/search_modal.css

New: https://searchBlossom.com/search_modal.css

The old URLs will continue to work for several months, but they are scheduled to be retired.