Today I will review finder, a popular Joomla! search extension.
First let me outline my experience with it: I have built four sites that are currently running their RC1 version. Each with very different needs and structure. Finder is a fantastic search system, it uses similar concepts to Google but locally for your site. Instead of matching the content simply by the keyword values or repetition it matches the content by phrases and concepts. For example if a user types in ‘blackberry’ it will execute a fairly acute search for that term. It searches the meta, content, url and title based on the weights you give to each. Thus you can specify a higher weight to the meta then lets say the url. How does this help? Well lets say that you have a site that uses a tagging solution like Joomla! tags. Which allows you to pool from the meta keywords of your articles. You will be conscious about what keywords you chose and thus it would be wise to give them a higher weight in the finder search parameters. In contrast if you do not even use the meta functions of articles you might as well give them a very low value and instead focus on title, content or url. Now here comes the cool part. If the user searches ‘Blackberry not iPhone’ finder selects only content that is related to blackberry and will not output anything related to iPhone. Once again based on weight. The user can also search for ‘Blackberry and iPhone not Sprint’ And finder would discern that they are looking for the first two and not the last. This is a very handy feature for large content sites as users can truly get relevant results based on their needs. Finder search also accounts for phrases. Which means that results are not just matched up by keywords but by the words surrounding those keywords. A question like “Why is Blackberry better than iPhone” will yield different results in comparison to “Is iPhone better than Blackberry?” [Provided of course that you have the content to accommodate the query.] To top all this off finder also offers plugins for the leading components out there. Including K2 content and even the Kunena forum. In the future it will offer more and more plugins for other components. Overall we get an outstanding search tool, and I would recommend it for any site project. You can get further details about finder here: Finder from jxtended
First let me outline my experience with it: I have built four sites that are currently running their RC1 version. Each with very different needs and structure. Finder is a fantastic search system, it uses similar concepts to Google but locally for your site. Instead of matching the content simply by the keyword values or repetition it matches the content by phrases and concepts. For example if a user types in ‘blackberry’ it will execute a fairly acute search for that term. It searches the meta, content, url and title based on the weights you give to each. Thus you can specify a higher weight to the meta then lets say the url. How does this help? Well lets say that you have a site that uses a tagging solution like Joomla! tags. Which allows you to pool from the meta keywords of your articles. You will be conscious about what keywords you chose and thus it would be wise to give them a higher weight in the finder search parameters. In contrast if you do not even use the meta functions of articles you might as well give them a very low value and instead focus on title, content or url. Now here comes the cool part. If the user searches ‘Blackberry not iPhone’ finder selects only content that is related to blackberry and will not output anything related to iPhone. Once again based on weight. The user can also search for ‘Blackberry and iPhone not Sprint’ And finder would discern that they are looking for the first two and not the last. This is a very handy feature for large content sites as users can truly get relevant results based on their needs. Finder search also accounts for phrases. Which means that results are not just matched up by keywords but by the words surrounding those keywords. A question like “Why is Blackberry better than iPhone” will yield different results in comparison to “Is iPhone better than Blackberry?” [Provided of course that you have the content to accommodate the query.] To top all this off finder also offers plugins for the leading components out there. Including K2 content and even the Kunena forum. In the future it will offer more and more plugins for other components. Overall we get an outstanding search tool, and I would recommend it for any site project. You can get further details about finder here: Finder from jxtended
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