Searches
Enabling Indexed Searches
Search Rules and Interface
Editing the Default Stopwords List
Troubleshooting
Resources
In the Control Panel > Customizing > General Settings > Search, you can enable searches of the content on your site.
You can choose to put the search button on just the top-level page or on all subpages as well. You can turn on a small search blank in one of your sidebars using the Theme settings. Users can search:
Users are only be able to search areas to which they have access. Pages from areas where they don't have access will not show up in their search results.
To turn off searches altogether, uncheck the boxes to remove the search buttons from the top level and nested pages.
Web Crossing uses a mini-database called a search index to help make the searches go quickly, even if your database grows very large.
Indexed searching is on, by default, at installation. To turn it off, go to: Control Panel > Customizing > General Settings > Search.
The master switch for creating (or re-creating) a search index is at the bottom of the Control Panel at Site management > Create search index. Web Crossing will create (or re-create) the search index when you click this link. Search index creation takes place in the background, meaning Web Crossing will still serve pages while it's indexing. When the index is done, the server will reload the page and tell you the index is ready to use. You might want to periodically recreate your search index because it makes a smaller file as it gets rid of information about deleted posts.
If a user clicks Search before you've created a search index, Web Crossing will begin indexing, informing the user that indexing is proceeding and s/he is currently unable to search the site. Search index files can be quite large - 50% the size of your database file or more.
Web Crossing search uses a number of rules in creating the index and performing searches:
To search for keywords or userIDs within your Web Crossing content, type in one or more words separated by spaces. Web Crossing will ignore upper or lower case and match all similar words with suffixes and plurals, such as "s" and "ed." Only items matching all the keywords will be returned.
Web Crossing will return the title, author and date/time of each post along with the first few words. The first 15 items will be displayed, and if there are more, clicking a button at the bottom will display the next 15.
If you put in a keyword you know is there and Web Crossing returns no matches, it might be too common a word or a word shorter than two characters. In order to save indexing space a large number of common words are not indexed>. Try again, using a more specific or uncommon term, or a longer word.
Editing the Default Stopwords List
Web Crossing omits a number of common words in order to minimize the size of the search index file and increase search speed. The list is found in a text file called stopwords.default in your webx system directory on the web server. You can edit this list if you wish. Here are the steps:
I'm searching for a word I know is in the database, but it's not showing up on search.
Sysop Documentation
Web Crossing FAQ
Sysop Control Panel