Date: Thu, 23 Aug 2018 11:22:00 -0400 From: William Thompson <billthompson76@gmail.com> Subject: [FreeHelp]Identifying People for Site Searches To: freepages-help@rootsweb.com Message-ID: <CAJb8BhZ_HrA8tAD2vDDu86YnHw2_WbyvuxKN-cTsRpBiqaJxmg@mail.gmail.com> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="UTF-8" I use a site search service that works the way it's supposed to -- matching words. My site has a lot of old letters. But when people try to search the site for references to them they usually are unsuccessful. For example, they want to find pages on my site that refer to John Q. Jones. But a document may refer to him as "John Jones", "J.Q. Jones", "Mr. Jones", "Uncle John". "father", etc. so the searcher comes up empty handed. In most cases, I have a link to that person's entry in my WorldConnect tree, but the contents of anchor tags aren't searched. Obviously I can add a note to each document saying "[This document mentions: John Q. Jones, Sally (Brown) Smith, ..." But that's rather obtrusive. Neither HTML comments or CSS comments are searched, but is there a way to add "index terms" to a page that will be searched, but not display when just viewing the page? I thought of making the text white, so it will be "invisible", but I'm not sure that would work on everyone's device, browser, etc. Surely others have encountered and dealt with this problem. ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 23 Aug 2018 13:08:35 -0400 From: JFlorian <cageycat@gmail.com> Subject: [FreeHelp]Re: Identifying People for Site Searches To: Freepages Web Sites <freepages-help@rootsweb.com> Message-ID: <CAE5hz-DC0q6CUjjTW-Jq7_xE2kKprNOjWYsSphXAyx4ncgLAXg@mail.gmail.com> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="UTF-8" Bite the bullet and transcribe the letters and annotate the text. ...father [John Q. Jones] -- put it right into the text. ------------------------------ 1. Thanks for the suggestion. The letters are transcribed. That's why the site search (I'm currently using FreeFind) works. But it only works if the words in the query are exact matches. Most of the names have been turned into links, so when reading a page, it's easy to click and find out who is being referred to. It's not a matter of avoiding work, it's a matter of minimizing the obtrusiveness -- both in terms of the flow of reading and preserving the look of the original. But letting the browsers do their thing without trying to impose the kind of control you can get with word processing or desk top publishing. Your suggestion certainly does allow searching -- but still requires the search to guess what to search for. I was hoping to add multiple index term, such as "John Quincy Jones", "John Jones" and sometimes "J. Quincy Jones" -- without cumbering up the page with a lot of distracting text when many people are referred to..