Venexus DotNetNuke Blog - Pro Version Features of Our DNN Search Engine Modules

Pro Version Features of Our DNN Search Engine Modules by Jeff Smith

The Venexus Search Engine is a DotNetNuke search module, plus a whole lot more. Not only does our DNN search module index your portal, but also external sites. VSE crawls pages on your site, aggregates RSS feeds from other sites, and crawls any links for external websites, making it a full search engine module. Unlike the core DNN Search module that uses a scheduled task to perform index updates, VSE crawls and indexes content based on user request. Seamus can be configured for several different setups and displays, including the ability to hide the module on every page. When a page is loaded that has the Seamus module on it, Seamus will go out and grab 3 RSS feeds and 3 queued URLs and add any new or updated content to the index. In order to not delay the page loading for the end user, Seamus utilizes AJAX to make aggregation request, providing a seamless integration into your site.

Here are the pro features of VSE:

1.1 Pro Features

Allow users to add their feeds

You can enable users to add feeds to the system.

Podcast Support

Indexed items that have files associated with them are used as enclosures (aka podcast) in the feeds that Seamus generates.

Pinging service

When the pinging service is enabled, every time something new is added/updated on your site Seamus will “ping” several XML-RPC web services for blog and feed aggregation sites to notify them your portal has new content. The aggregators will then come to your site and aggregate your feed and provide links to their users to your site.

Here are a few services we ping:

Custom User-Agent

You can set your own user-agent to specify your own crawler name. The default user-agent is “Seamus/1.1 PRO ( http://search.venexus.com)”.

Global Crawler

The pro version allows you to be a global crawler. Any links found on your site, from aggregated news feeds, or from external links are crawled and indexed.

So, not only are you able to aggregate even more content with the Pro version when compared to the Standard version, but you also get the search engine optimization benefits of pinging all of the major blog and feed aggregation services. This provides you with links directly to your site, generating more web traffic. You can watch your page rank grow very quickly with this feature.

Since the release of the 1.1 version, we have steadily been working on the 1.2 version. We are now testing the latest version on our demo site: search.venexus.com.

1.2 Pro Features (March 1, 2007 Release)

New file formats indexed

You asked for it, so we added support for all of the most common Office document file types as well as PDF documents. We have added a new document-to-text converter to our crawler that is able to parse the actual text from these documents. So not only does Seamus crawl and index HTML, Text, and XML files, but also the following new formats:

1. Excel files

2. PDF files

3. PowerPoint files

4. Rich text files

5. Word documents

Social Bookmarking Support

In the search results you can enable social bookmarking to allow users to easily add bookmarks to their favorite social bookmarking application/service. This allows user to easily find their favorite links to your site. Also, the sites that provide this service will generate a link to your site, giving you more traffic once again.

Here is an example of what it looks like: