[WEB4LIB] Re: another tangent to Re: Inline forms in CSS

[Jody Cleveland]

Thomas Dowling [mailto:tdowling at ohiolink.edu] wrote:

> It's a pity the Atomz didn't take the obvious step of delimiting 
> non-indexed parts of the document with comments.  It seems obvious to me 
> that you could look for "<!-- atomz indexing off -->...<!-- atomz indexing

> on -->" without affecting the validity of the document.  If they have 
> responsive developers, you might suggest something like that.

Well, I contacted Atomz like you suggested, and here's what they had to say:

"The Atomz Search robot ignores text found between the opening and closing
comment tags as shown below:
<!-- This is a comment -->
The text found, however, between two comments, will not be ignored - meaning
it will be indexed:
<!-- Beginning of comment --> This is a comment <!-- End of comment -->
"This is a comment" gets indexed.  The text inside the tags does not.
I'm afraid we do not presently offer the capability you describe.  I will be
sure to pass the request along to our product development team for
consideration."

> If you were running a search engine on your own server that looked at the 
> source HTML files rather than getting them through your server, you could 
> use server-side includes for the navigation bars.  Then they wouldn't even

> be in the files that get indexed.

So, in light of this, do you have any suggestions for search engines that
are either cheap or free?  I think Atomz results are pretty accurate, but I
don't want to "invalidate" my pages just to have the search engine work.
You brought up some great points in regards to that.  Any ideas would be
great!

-Jody Cleveland

Winnefox Library System
Computer Support Specialist