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In the "Configure Results" section of your account manager's
Designing controls, you can choose how each search result will appear.
You can experiment until you like what you see, and consider the
following options:
The linked title of each search result will link back
to the document on your website, so this is usually the document's
title. For HTML, the document's title is the words between the
following tags in the header: <title> This is the title
</title>
Any specific document can override its title in the search
results pages by including the following tag in the document's header:
<!-- PICOTITLE="This is the overriding title." -->
The title (and meta description) can also be overridden from the link that points to the document, which is great for controlling the titles of non-HTML documents like PDFs that might not have a useful title property (PDF titles usually work out, other formats may not). Only the first link to the doc found by the crawler will be used this way, so a good central method to control doc titles from links would be to make a reference page of links just for PicoSearch, and set it to be the first Entry Point for indexing. You can then put a NOINDEX tag at the top to ensure this reference page won't get into search results.
<a href="mydoc.pdf" PICOTITLE="This is the overriding title set in the parent link." >
If you try to put HTML formatting in the title (especially convenient in the
PICOTITLE tags) then it will be stored and displayed in the results page,
potentially overriding the usual look and feel of a linked title. For
example, the title could include an image, line breaks, and even an end
anchor tag </a> to stop the usual title linking on some words.
For paying accounts only, there is a feature in the account
manager's Index Modes to "Override title from tag if found", using the
pattern of a tag and an optional attribute=value. This can be very
useful for certain authoring systems that make title information
available in a tag such as <span>.
Alternatively, for the linked title you can choose to display
the Document's File Name, the Document's Full URL, or the Document's
Meta Description. For HTML, the document's meta description is the words
in the quotes of the following header tag: <meta name=description
content="This is the meta desc">\
After the linked title, the Meta Description is
usually displayed. Obviously if you're using the meta description as
the title, you'll want to turn it off and not repeat it. Or you may
have meta desccriptions that aren't desirable to be seen; either way,
you can turn the meta description on/off, as well as control the length
of a default meta description that is made from the document's beginning
words when a particular document has no meta.
Any specific document can override its meta description for
PicoSearch by including either of the following tags in the document's
header. They are equivalent, but the second is longer and more in the
style of HTML.
<!-- PICOMETADESC="This is the overriding meta description." -->
<!-- PICOMETA NAME="DESCRIPTION" CONTENT="This is the overriding meta description." -->
The meta description (and title) can also be overridden from the link that points to the document, which is great for controlling the metas of non-HTML documents like PDFs that might not have a useful meta property. Only the first link to the doc found by the crawler will be used this way, so a good central method to control doc metas from links would be to make a reference page of links just for PicoSearch, and set it to be the first Entry Point for indexing. You can then put a NOINDEX tag at the top to ensure this reference page won't get into search results.
<a href="mydoc.pdf" PICOMETADESC="This is the overriding meta description set in the parent link." >
If you have HTML in the meta description (especially convenient
in the PICOMETADESC tag) then it will be stored and displayed in the
results page, potentially overriding the usual look and feel of the
results. For example, a store could implement an entire "buy it now"
section with shopping cart buttons in a search result for a product.
Next comes the Concordance,
which is the excerpts of the document that match the search. In your
account manager's Configure Results section, you can set the concordance
on/off and control its width. For paying accounts, you can also set
the number of concordance lines and the line breaking between them. The
display of concordance can optionally be suppressed for certain
documents. In the Password Protected Directory Logon section, you can
hide concordance for all protected documents. You can also insert the
following tag into any specific files, causing those documents to never
show concordance in search results:
<!-- PICOSEARCH_HIDE_CONCORDANCE -->
Meta keywords are not generally visible unless you choose
to include them in the searchable index, then they may show up in the
concordance. For options of what is searchable, see the Index Modes
section of your account manager. And like the meta descriptions, meta
keywords can be overridden just for PicoSearch by either of the two
following tags:
<!-- PICOMETAKEYWORDS="This is the overriding meta keywords." -->
<!-- PICOMETA NAME="KEYWORDS" CONTENT="This is the overriding meta keywords." -->
Next comes the optional display of the full URL, along with a status line consisting of file date and length. If you have a paying account, you
can do date sorting and will probably want to display the date. The
file's date is usually when the file was last changed on your server,
but PicoSearch offers other exciting date setting options. We recommend that you play with these settings until you find what works best for you.
Other possibilities for customizing the search results for each document, include the setting of user icons and, if you have a paying account, the use of template codes for CSS stylesheet variations. For rules regarding non-HTML document types, see the FAQ on indexable formats
PicoSearch offers many Designing possibilities, so check out the "Configure Results" section as well as the related "Page Design" section in your account manager, and have fun!
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