Today I will review <a href=”http://jxtended.com/extensions/finder.html“>finder</a>,
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:
<a href=”http://jxtended.com/extensions/finder.html“>Finder
from jxtended</a>
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:
<a href=”http://jxtended.com/extensions/finder.html“>Finder
from jxtended</a>
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