What are the benefits of using Web Indexer?
Environment:
Web Indexer
Oracle B2C Service
Resolution:
The Oracle B2C Service Web Indexer enables indexing and searching of documents that are not part of your published public answers of your Oracle B2C Service application. For example, the Web Indexer allows additional Web pages, PDFs, and Microsoft Word documents to be indexed and searchable from your Oracle B2C Service end-user pages.
Note: The Web Indexer feature is sold separately from your Oracle B2C Service applications. For more information on pricing and options, please contact your sales account manager.
The Web Indexer makes it possible for end-users and agents to search for and access the additional documents and Web pages when searching from the Find Answers page. Indexing and searching of external documents are possible if the documents are stored on a Web server and are accessible via a URL. This will usually be limited to those files within the document root, CGI root, or FTP root directories.
From the end-user pages, users can click the Documents button to search published answers and/or the additional pages that have been indexed. Initially, when users access the Documents page, the list of published answers displays. When the search is performed, additional links may display if the indexed pages match the search word or phrase.
After you configure a root URL to be indexed and searchable, a Web spider is used to follow the hyperlinks contained within the Web page, indexing each consecutive page. If any of the consecutive Web pages contain hyperlinks, those hyperlinks are followed and those Web hyperlinks that are within specified domains, but are not among the excluded domains, subdomains, or URLs. Specified and excluded domains are configurable through the Management and Configuration Console.
It is possible to have multiple URLs directed to the same document through URL masking and redirection, or the use of query parameters in a URL. During indexing, URLs are normalized to prevent a document from being indexed more than once. This normalization allows the spider to index the document a single time, which saves drive space on the server, increases search performance, and prevents end-users from getting the same document returned twice during a search.
Note: External documents are not re-indexed if edited. You must run the keywordindexer utility after editing an external document if that document is to be re-indexed. You should schedule keywordindexer to re-index external documents nightly, weekly, or monthly, depending on how many changes are made to external documents on a particular site. The keyword indexes for external documents will be stored in a file on the Web server rather than in a database table.
For additional information, refer to the 'Overview of Finding Content on the Customer Portal' section in online documentation for the version your site is currently running. To access Oracle B2C Service manuals and documentation online, refer to the Documentation for Oracle B2C Service Products.
