Zoom Search Engine - Add search to your site! (PHP) Editor's Review

Editor's rating

The editor's rating is calculated based on the average of the following criteria, rated on a
scale of 1 of 5:

• Installation: 5
• Features: 5
• Interface: 4
• Customization: 5
• Help and support: 5

Bottom line

"Zoom Search Engine has nice features that help it stand out in a bleak, speed-conscious, and all-purpose search indexing world — and it works without a hitch." - Ahmad Permessur, Editor - HotScripts.com

Pros and cons

Pros

• It's easy to install and configure.
• It includes its own spidering tool and doesn't rely on external web services or search APIs.
• The search result page is customizable via HTML and CSS and be skinned easily to match your site’s design.
• It supports indexing for popular file formats including PDF, MS Office files and image files.
• There are tons of configuration options to fully control indexing and search results.
• It sports a state-of-the-art ranking algorithm that provides relevant, accurate and quick search results.

Cons

• The desktop indexer application runs under Windows only. (However, the search engine portion works on most major platforms.)

Detailed review

Wrensoft's Zoom Search Engine is an affordable solution to easily add search to your website, web application, intranet and even to your CD/DVD. It consists of two components: desktop software, the Zoom Indexer that crawls and indexes the files either offline or online; and a server-side script that captures search terms and returns the results.

I was able to create a search engine for a small-sized site of less than 200 pages in less than ten minutes. After supplying a URL, Zoom Indexer's spider crawled the site and generated an indexed file that was uploaded to my web server. It also generated the required server-side scripts to power the actual search and search result pages. This whole process was very simple and didn't require any convoluted configuration. If you're concerned about whether this application will work on your web server, rest assured that Zoom Search Engine is able to generate server-side scripts in PHP, ASP, ASP.NET and CGI.

The indexer performs very well under different types of websites, both static and dynamic. In several tests that I ran, the indexer never crashed and was able to generate the indexed data reasonably fast. As a bonus, the indexer will also point out broken links as it crawls your site and has an option to generate XML sitemaps. It also beefs up an array of useful features and configuration settings. Examples are the ability to specify file extensions or folders to include, sections of pages to index, the crawl depth, and the layout of your search results pages.

Zoom Search Engine is more than a traditional search engine. It provides enterprise level search features well geared for large dynamic sites like e-commerce or directories. Its categories and custom meta search fields features allow you to provide an advanced and database-like search experience. The company also provides a nice bundle of indexing plugins for searching PDF, DOC, PPT, XLS and image files.

The one thing that initially made me skeptical is the fact that you need to re-index your site each time you have new or updated pages. But Zoom Indexer has two secret weapons. First, it supports incremental indexing, which means that you can have it index only modified or new pages without doing a full re-index. Second, it has a built-in scheduler that automates indexing at pre-defined intervals and uploads the indexed data to your site via FTP. The scheduler can also be set to run statistical reports on your site's search usage — reports that provide insightful information about your users' search behavior.

By default, Zoom Search Engine uses its propriety-ranking algorithm to return results based on relevancy, and I have to confess that its scoring system surprised me. I compared the order of results as returned by Zoom Search Engine against that of Google custom search for the test site that I indexed, and they're ranked pretty well in the same order. Whatever secret sauce they've cooked into their application, Wrensoft did an excellent job of addressing relevancy where many competitors failed. Even better, you can also manipulate and overwrite the default ranking by configuring custom weights for different page elements like title, keywords, body content, etc. You can even add some specific META tags to pages you want to drive to the top of your result pages.

Overall, Zoom Search Engine shines as a search engine solution. It combines must-have basics with enterprise-level functionality in its indexer, algorithm and search application to provide a functional search experience aimed at any site type and size.

Screenshots