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.. ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 23 Aug 2018 16:40:46 -0600 From: "Ralph Taylor" <rt-sails@comcast.net> Subject: [FreeHelp]Re: Identifying People for Site Searches To: <freepages-help@rootsweb.com> Message-ID: <0C02CE9FE2AE46099E9728AC309D923F@Rt2013PC> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" What you're bumping up against is the "literality" of computers. "John O. Jones" is not identical to "John Jones". This is a problem I face in my Taylor Family Genes site; it has a sub-directory devoted to user-submitted family trees, https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=http-3A__www.TaylorFamilyGenes.info_fam-2Dtrees&d=DwICAg&c=kKqjBR9KKWaWpMhASkPbOg&r=AGsq94QXfKqnOmeiylQOdyiSx1pxsPac8QlHnLzZS9o&m=ylzZ5g8rHKaN_O47rHEvpvhn0S6H9M-Hp3zOqGh7kuc&s=LPKirS4c_JxYmLsS_evU8JcG6Zhf0oAQAmJNfuCGkYY&e=. To facilitate search-engine performance, I edit name and date information to put it in standardized form. (Submitters use too many different conventions.) I don't think you should change original documents to make them fit the search engine. But you could add name-varaint labels to the docs to make them findable. Sort of like putting "keywords" in a meta tag. If each document is in a separate file (and then "included"), you could you could use meta tags in the head section to help the search engine. Your labels wold not be visible on the page but they would render the file findable. ------------------------------ Ralph, Thanks for understanding why I don't want to clutter the reader's screen with a lot o index terms, And I do use meta tags (but peraps not enough to help people wo are doing web searches with Google, Yahoo, etc. to find my pages. But that's not what I'm asking about. My question has to do with people who are already on my family history web site, and want to search withing it for names of people. The search tool I've installed is "FreeFind", but I think it's competitors all work pretty much the same. They ignore the contents of HTML tags. So either I do someting visible like add a superscript footnote number in te main text and then put the names in visible text that both humans and the FreeFind software can read. Or, I somehow make it invisible to humans (such as white letters on a white background - which would let the site search software find it. Surely others who use site search services have grappled with this issue.