Fully Customized

Thunderstone Search Appliance Manual

Fully Customized

Best Bets can also be created fully customized. The first step is to define a group. This is done from the "Bestbet Groups" page under "Tools". You can name the group, and decide which information will be displayed about the group.

After creating a group, you can use, the "Manage BestBets" link to add Best Bets to the group. You can also browse "List/Edit URLs" page enter the URL you want, and click on the URL to get the details on that URL. The fields on the form are:

Url - The URL to link to with this Best Bet. Only used when adding Best Bets directly to the group, rather than going through "List/Edit URLs`.
Priority (optional) - An integer priority for this Best Bet. If multiple Best Bets match a given user query, they are shown in descending numerical Priority order. If there is only one Best Bet set per URL, or the order does not matter, a Priority need not be set.
Title- The title that will be displayed for the Best Bet on the search results page.
Keywords- A space-separated list of keywords that will be searched against to trigger this Best Bet. A Best Bet is displayed when the user query matches the Keywords, just as if they were document text.
Group- Which Best Bet Group this Best Bet will be created in. A Best Bet will only have a chance to match if its group is set to display as either Top Best Bets or Right Best Betson the Search Settings page.
If no groups currently exist, (create new) will be displayed, and a group will be created for you if you enter keywords and a title for this Best Bet.
Only used when adding BestBets through List/Edit URLs, rather than adding to a Best Bet group directly.
Description (optional) - The description to display for this Best Bet. The Best Bet Group for this Best Bet might be set to not display the description, so it's optional.

The title and description can contain HTML code. Be careful that it does not disrupt the rest of the page layout. You can create multiple entries for the same URL. Each time you save a new set of blank boxes will be shown.

Once the Best Bets are created you can go to the "Search Settings" page to set up how they are displayed. For the top and right placements you can define which group is shown there, what title if any to display above the links, and the color, size and style of the boxes around the Best Bets.

As with any of the Search Settings these will apply to the "Test Search" first, and then when you apply the settings be copied to the "Live Search", allowing you to test the settings and make sure they are appropriate before going live.