A Few Observations/Questions

[robert222776]

I implemented BOSS on my own site (without any customization of the search results content) to better understand how it works, My conclusions are admittedly empirical (no search theory involved here) since they come from my own testing. Perhaps they are obvious to those familiar with how Yahoo (Web) or Google search works.

1. I compared BOSS search with Yahoo's Web search. modifying the search terms slightly for the Web search case. The results were nearly identical for the Web search and my site search.

2.As an interesting side note, (for some reason) one page on my site was never indexed by Yahoo spiders. Consequently a search for keywords within the content on that page did not show any results for either my site search or the web search. BTW, Google did not miss indexing the page.

Conclusion: For the BOSS search to work, a page(s) must already have been indexed by Yahoo. The BOSS API itself does not initiate or do any indexing of the site. Hence the real meaning behind your marketing statement, "Add the power of Yahoo!'s search engine and extensive search index to your website". It seems obvious to me now, but I really did not give this point much thought before.

3. The search results displayed (most of the time) come directly from the meta tag for description content (BOSS calls it "abstract"). If the meta description content="", then search terms from the page content will be displayed prominently in the search results. This is true for both BOSS and Yahoo Web. In one test case, results displayed page content (instead the description content). My site is not large, only about 13 pages, so experimental sample sizes were small.

4. Most of the time, if there is meta description content, then the content on the actual page is ignored for a BOSS search, i.e "no results found". When I searched for the same phrases from actual content on my pages with Yahoo web, I got positive results.

Question: I am interested to know if others see this too, or if Web Assist has seen this? I do not really know if the page contend was not indexed, only that it was not displayed in the results.

Question: Is the length or number of words in the meta description a factor, such that long descriptions effectively leave no room for page content to be displayed, and short descriptions do leave room?

Question: What parameters control the amount of results displayed?

Question: What are the drivers that determine the BOSS results content that is actually displayed (beyond what I see in the Dreamweaver bindings)?

I do not see any Dreamweaver bindings for "page content" even though the content has been indexed by Yahoo.

Inconsistency in what seems to be driving the results makes it hard to have confidence in BOSS, especially for larger sites. The concern, obviously, is that BOSS is leaving out pages that should be counted in the site search results, even though Yahoo has indexed them.

Question: What might cause this to happen? Is this a fundamental limitation in BOSS, or a limitation in my understanding/implementation of BOSS?

Question: How should (can it?) the BOSS_include.php file be edited such that page content is always included in the search results?

I hope I have not bored everyone with these questions and observations. I am admittedly not a search guru.

Thanks,
Robert

[Eric Mittman]

As far as I know the results that are returned by the implementation of BOSS should match what you get with a Yahoo search.

Do you have an example for us of a search that can be performed on yahoo that gives different results than the BOSS results? A link to your search page on your site and the terms used for the search would be ideal.

When we have an example of this it will be easier to determine what might be happening and why.

[robert222776]

Try this:

http://www.evantagefive.com

Search phrase: "Our initial one-hour consultation with you is free" without the quotes, which is the first line on the Consultation page. I got no results found when searching on my site.

Then try on Yahoo search:

Search phrase: "evantagefive Our initial one-hour consultation with you is free" without the quotes. You will get a result.

The big question for me is why doesn't BOSS see the phrase in the main content. I realize it looks for the information inside of the meta description tag when there is content there, but it does not appear to look at the page content (unless meta description content="".

How can I force BOSS to look at the page content all the time, besides the meta description?

Thanks,
Robert

[Eric Mittman]

Thanks for the details, I can see just what you mean. I was not able to determine why the results are returned differently. I have opened a ticket for you on this issue. To update the ticket please login and visit your support history.

[robert222776]

Thanks Eric. I have provided contact information and uploaded files of interest. Please let me know if you need anything else.

Robert

[Eric Mittman]

This should be all that is needed for now, when the ticket is responded to you should receive a notification.

[robert222776]

Here is an update on the problem from the ticked opened by WA.

WA Engineering reports and I quote "we don't have any control on the results that are being returned by Search for BOSS, or any control over what content to read on your site pages. Search for BOSS return the results that are being returned from the the Yahoo Search for BOSS API, which is controlled by the indexing of the pages."

From what I can tell, content is indexed by BOSS. However, repeated testing shows what I believe might be limitation of BOSS, or a bug. Anytime my search word or phrase included a hyphen, I got "no results". I tried a number of hyphenated words that appear on my site such as e-Commerce, full-service Web Design, in-depth knowledge of web design, etc. Note that the main Yahoo search was fine. Only BOSS failed to display search results for hyphenated words.

I know the hyphenated word has been indexed because if I search using the words that precede or follow the hyphenated word, I get the results I should, including the hyphenated word appearing as part of the returned text. I just cannot use a hyphenated word in the search phrase.

Any thoughts?

Thanks,
Robert

[robert222776]

Here is the fix for the hyphen problem:

WA was able to reproduce this issue and has logged the issue in their bug base. To fix this issue, look for this line of code on the page that displays the search results.

$word = "/^[a-z|A-Z|0-9| |-|\"]+$/";

and change it to:

$word = "/^[a-z|A-Z|0-9| |\-|\"]+$/";

Thanks WA!

Robert

[toms016390756]

I had noticed when searching yahoo or google in the past that sometimes you can get different results based on the ip location of your search. So if I search for "buy xyz" on west coast of the US and my friend searches the same phrase on the east coast. the results order can be a bit different from one another.

http://www.imgsnatch.com/img/S/9.jpg