[Pro] Atomz is Dead. Replace with Google?

JDW · April 4, 2014, 7:06am

I’ve been an Atomz Search user for many years, but today discovered that my searches result in a 404. After pondering various free alternatives (no, I am not a coder who wants to fiddle with PHP or databases), I am considering Google’s free search. I setup an account and pasted code into my site, but there are problems.

First, when I put the Search Results in the OVERLAY theme, my CSSmenus search bar always remains on top and covers the “X” closebox. How in the world do I fix that? (Applying the Layer Positioning Action to my CSSmenu and changing the Z-index there does nothing.)

Second, I have an existing search field that I used in conjunction with Atomz Search. I’d like to retain that field and use any searches entered through it to bring up the Overlay. But I haven’t the faintest idea how to do that. Do any of you know?

Any thoughts would be appreciated.

Thanks,

James

freewaytalk mailing list
email@hidden
Update your subscriptions at:
http://freewaytalk.net/person/options

JDW · April 4, 2014, 7:26am

To get even more specific, here’s the top page of my site:

Note the existing search field in the bottom left corner. I want to use that existing search field with Google search. So when you type a keyword in that field and hit return, it will cough up the Search Results OVERLAY atop that same page, yet keeping the overlay properly beneath my CSSmenu navi bar.

Again, I look forward to hearing your thoughts.

Thank you.

freewaytalk mailing list
email@hidden
Update your subscriptions at:
http://freewaytalk.net/person/options

JDW · April 7, 2014, 1:45am

The utter dearth of replies would indicate that:

Most of you don’t use a search function in your sites, or
Most of you never used Google or Atomz, or
Most of you are hardcore coders who’ve masterfully hacked together a custom in-site search feature, or
Most of you simply don’t care.

Well, I may not be a coder, but I do care, so if some of you Search Experts could please share some thoughts, I (and everyone else on this list who once used Atomz) would certainly be grateful.

Many thanks for your time!

freewaytalk mailing list
email@hidden
Update your subscriptions at:
http://freewaytalk.net/person/options

waltd · April 7, 2014, 2:50am

In my experience, it’s either the Simple Site Search or something industrial like Sphinx, with nought but a mighty learning curve between them. There are services you can hire to replace Atomz, but I don’t know anything free that is tasteful. Have you tried any of the PHP/MySQL search scripts? There are some (http://www.sphiderpro.eu) that are quite robust that can “spider” your static content, store it in the database, then use the database to provide nice search results.

Walter

On Apr 6, 2014, at 9:45 PM, JDW wrote:

The utter dearth of replies would indicate that:

Most of you don’t use a search function in your sites, or

Most of you never used Google or Atomz, or

Most of you are hardcore coders who’ve masterfully hacked together a custom in-site search feature, or

Most of you simply don’t care.

Well, I may not be a coder, but I do care, so if some of you Search Experts could please share some thoughts, I (and everyone else on this list who once used Atomz) would certainly be grateful.

Many thanks for your time!

freewaytalk mailing list
email@hidden
Update your subscriptions at:
http://freewaytalk.net/person/options

freewaytalk mailing list
email@hidden
Update your subscriptions at:
http://freewaytalk.net/person/options

JDW · April 7, 2014, 3:04am

Walter,

Thanks for your reply.

I’ve actually spent quite a bit of time with Google’s Custom Search. I can’t get it to put Search Results in an OVERLAY like I want, but I was able to get it to display Results in a separate page in my site. That will have to suffice, I guess.

Google is picking up just about everything on my server, so I have to spend a lot of time excluding folders that were otherwise hidden from view with Atomz.

The main issue I see is that Google is also indexing my CSSmenus Navigation bar. (Atomz never did that.) I found the following page that tells me how to exclude Navigation, simply by enabling the “nocontent” feature:

https://support.google.com/customsearch/answer/2364585?hl=en

The only question I have is about adding a new CLASS to my CSSmenus. Right now, there is an existing class named “fwColumn”. I can add a new class easily by selecting my CSSmenu on the Master page in Freeway, then choosing Item: Extended:

and adding Name = class, Value = nocontent. When I examine the HTML, I see the following:

<div id="NavigationBar" ... class="fwColumn nocontent">

In other words, I have two classes for the same DIV. Google says that will work fine for their search engine, but will CSSmenus play well with multiple classes?

Thanks.

freewaytalk mailing list
email@hidden
Update your subscriptions at:
http://freewaytalk.net/person/options

waltd · April 7, 2014, 3:06am

This is perfectly normal. You may add as many classes to an element as you like.

Walter

On Apr 6, 2014, at 11:04 PM, JDW wrote:

In other words, I have two classes for the same DIV. Google says that will work fine for their search engine, but will CSSmenus play well with multiple classes?

freewaytalk mailing list
email@hidden
Update your subscriptions at:
http://freewaytalk.net/person/options

JDW · April 7, 2014, 5:52am

Well, I may need to check out sphiderpro.eu after all.

I’ve spent a few hours today on getting Google Search setup on my main site, and while it works fine for English keyword searches, Japanese keywords yield no Search Results (blank page).

I tried changing the default page encoding in Google from UTF-8 to SHIFT_JIS (since my web pages built in Freeway are SHIFT_JIS), but I still get no Results on Japanese searches. (But again, English keyword searches continue to yield Results.)

The really frustrating part is, I can get Results on Japanese searches when using my Public URL:

https://www.google.com/cse/publicurl?cx=018348177762133457495:mdzyzovqz2q

So Google clearly doesn’t like something on my Freeway-built pages, but for the life of me, I cannot figure out what it is.

I am using the following script in the page Markup for my website’s Search Results page:

<script>
  (function() {
    var cx = '018348177762133457495:mdzyzovqz2q';
    var gcse = document.createElement('script');
    gcse.type = 'text/javascript';
    gcse.async = true;
    gcse.src = (document.location.protocol == 'https:' ? 'https:' : 'http:') +
        '//www.google.com/cse/cse.js?cx=' + cx;
    var s = document.getElementsByTagName('script')[0];
    s.parentNode.insertBefore(gcse, s);
  })();
</script>

Form Setup (applied to all pages via Master):

Method: GET
Action: 検索結果

Hidden Fields (applied to all pages via Master):

Name: cx
Value: 018348177762133457495:mdzyzovqz2q

Extended (applied to all pages via Master):

Name: name
Value: q

Search Field’s Name: q

HTML Markup Item Code (used only on my Search Results page):

<gcse:searchresults-only></gcse:searchresults-only>

You can test it out on any of the Japanese pages in my KIRAMEK.COM domain (search field is located in bottom left corner of every page):

Any thoughts would be appreciated.

freewaytalk mailing list
email@hidden
Update your subscriptions at:
http://freewaytalk.net/person/options

Max_Fancourt · April 7, 2014, 6:15am

Hi james I have used this script which works on static and dynamic sites and is quite easy to set up
http://codecanyon.net/item/php-search-engine/89499?WT.ac=solid_search_item&WT.seg_1=solid_search_item&WT.z_author=dtbaker

its a commercial script but at 8$ it isn’t going to break the bank. You can set varies things like which files you want not to search and you can specify how regular you want the script to update its self… (this is used for dynamic sites).

Anyway it may be of use
max

freewaytalk mailing list
email@hidden
Update your subscriptions at:
http://freewaytalk.net/person/options

JDW · April 7, 2014, 7:58am

Walter, the Sphider Pro site has troubles:

http://www.sphiderpro.eu/demo/index.php

Clicking “Web” leads me no where, and clicking “Images” yields a 404 page.

Moreover, the word “License” has fallen outside and below its button for some reason.

Thank you, Max. I’ll give you suggested low-cost script a look-over after I’ve given Google’s Help forum a try. After spending several hours on Google, I’d like to see it actually work! Interestingly, it does work for both Japanese and English, but only at the Public Search page outside my site. And although English searches work fine within my site, Japanese searches do not. It can’t be page encoding, because my Freeway-built web pages are all SHIFT_JIS, and I set the “Search engine encoding” in Google Search settings to match (previously it was UTF-8). So hopefully some helpful person in the Google Search forum will come to my rescue. If not, CodeCanyon is next on my agenda.

Thanks.

freewaytalk mailing list
email@hidden
Update your subscriptions at:
http://freewaytalk.net/person/options

waltd · April 7, 2014, 11:58am

Take this off. The form element doesn’t need a name parameter, and the only thing on your page that should be named ‘q’ is the search field itself.

Note that this is not by itself going to solve your Japanese search mystery, but it’s something you should do anyway.

Walter

On Apr 7, 2014, at 1:52 AM, JDW wrote:

Extended (applied to all pages via Master):

Name: name

Value: q

freewaytalk mailing list
email@hidden
Update your subscriptions at:
http://freewaytalk.net/person/options

JDW · April 8, 2014, 12:42am

Thank you for the deletion advice, Walter. Sadly, removing that redundant ‘q’ didn’t solve the Japanese keyword problem.

Even more disappointing is that my post to the Custom Search forum (the only place Google offers support) garnered me a whopping 2 views and 0 replies in the last 24 hours. Amazing how bad the support is in consideration of the fact Google is a SEARCH company. And while it’s true that I am using the free search service, if I can’t get the free service to work, why in THE world would I ever consider paying them my money? It’s laughable.

But I will give it a few days before I consider a PHP script solution. If it wasn’t for that fact that Japanese keywords yield no results, the rest of my setup is perfect and can be left in place as is. Searches on English keywords works great, and the ads, while annoying, aren’t too troubling.

freewaytalk mailing list
email@hidden
Update your subscriptions at:
http://freewaytalk.net/person/options

JDW · April 9, 2014, 1:11am

Fixed.

It simply must be a bug in Google’s silly code, but I nevertheless found the fix. Despite Google’s Custom Search offering full support for Shift_JIS, and despite my having set the search engine to Shift_JIS, Custom Search in fact does not support Shift_JIS! Changing my pages to UTF-8 fixed the problem.

For those interested in all the details of what I went through, you can find that in the following forum:

https://productforums.google.com/d/msg/customsearch/XE5d5RdlzrI/GVvxoC5l1zsJ

All said, Google’s free Custom Search does work (on UTF-8 encoded pages at least), and you need not fiddle with PHP or custom scripts. There are ads, but nothing I find excessively obtrusive or worth paying money to eliminate.

freewaytalk mailing list
email@hidden
Update your subscriptions at:
http://freewaytalk.net/person/options