Searchable Catalogue

If the site you have is analogous to a corporate site containing a html format catalogue. The TRIST tool can index the pages of the index to provide a product search. The contents of the catalogue is not important so for this example we shall assume the catalogue is of books.

In the first example, assume that the files have been arranged intuitively where the catalogue is stored under one folder called ‘Catalogue’. Within that folder is a series of subfolders, each representing a range of products i.e. Childrens books, Fiction etc. To create this index you would select the ‘Catalogue’ folder and identify the URL in the same fashion as with the ‘Knowledge Base’ example. Most likely the URL will just be ‘../Catalogue’.

If the file structure is quite erratic, perhaps the range folders are not held within one parent folder but are all first level folders from site root, a different approach is required. In this case, each folder would need to be defined as a ‘Watch Folder’ and the URL identified according to the circumstance. TRIST can not make ammends for poor site design.

That covers the WF aspect of catergory based sites. But, with this type of content, the ‘Stop List’ (SL) can be quite destructive to search results if not limited to bare essentials. Because catergory pages tend to be simple and contain a minimum of plain English, the SL should only contain words such as ‘of’, ‘a’ and ‘the’. This is to prevent some product names being overlooked. This is especially important where product codes are used. Manufacturers and retailers invariably code their products often using alpha-numeric terms. If the catalogue includes a whole range of products that begin with the prefix ‘A’ followed by whitespace, this will result in a whole range being missed from the index. It is important to clear the SL defaults that might cause problems before indexing the documents.