General Settings
The General tab holds the settings that govern how the whole index is built. Changes take effect on the next index build, not immediately.
Settings
|
Setting |
What it does |
|---|---|
|
Enable Indexing |
Master switch. When cleared, no index build runs for this domain and language. An existing index is left in place. |
|
Enable Logging |
Writes a detailed record of each build to the log files shown on the Logs tab. Useful while tuning; adds overhead and disk usage, so it is commonly switched off once a site is stable. |
|
Security Key |
A key associated with this domain's search configuration. If left empty, one is generated automatically. |
|
Lemma |
The language used to reduce words to their root form, so that searching for one form of a word matches the others — "running", "runs" and "ran" all matching "run", for example. Set this to the language of the content being indexed. Defaults to English. |
|
Maximum Link Depth |
How many links deep the crawler travels from the starting page. A depth of 1 indexes only pages linked directly from the home page. Raising it reaches more of the site but lengthens the build. |
|
Meta Name Weight Factor |
How much extra importance to give words found in a page's meta keywords. Higher values push pages whose keywords match the search term further up the results. Range 0–999; default 20. |
|
Meta Description Weight Factor |
The same idea applied to the meta description. Range 0–999; default 10. |
|
Search Index DLL |
The component that performs the indexing. Leave at the default unless a custom indexer has been built for your installation. Enterprise edition only — see Extending the Indexer. |
|
Current Status |
Read-only. Reports the progress of a running build and the outcome of the last one. |
|
Build Index |
Starts an index build immediately for the current domain and language. |
Tuning Relevance with the Weight Factors
The two weight factors are the simplest lever you have over result ordering. A word appearing in a page's meta keywords counts for more than the same word appearing in body text, and the factor decides how much more. Raising the meta name weight is an effective way to promote a small number of important pages: give them well-chosen meta keywords and they will rank above pages that merely mention the term in passing.
Setting either factor to 0 removes that field's influence entirely. For finer control over individual pages, see the boost factor described in Controlling Indexing from Page Markup.
Choosing a Link Depth
Link depth is the setting most often responsible for missing content. The crawler counts hops from the starting page, so a news article three clicks in — home, then news listing, then page two of the listing, then the article — needs a depth of at least 4 to be reached.
If pages are missing from search, raise the depth by one and rebuild before changing anything else. Bear in mind that each additional level can multiply the number of pages visited, so build times grow accordingly.