Overview
 Search Form
 Output Format 
 Advanced Integration 
 Search Options 
 Indexing Options 
 Activity Reports 
   Weekly Reports
   Most Popular Searches 
 
 Troubleshooting 
 FAQs 

 
   Search Activity Reports tell you what your visitors are searching for and how successful those searches are.

Weekly Search Activity Reports

Each search on an index is recorded in a logfile for the index. Periodically, Blossom prepares an activity report from the logfile for the previous activity period. A notice that the report is ready is sent to one or more email addresses. Follow the "Spidering, Indexing, and Reporting" link on your search configuration page at BlossomSoftware.net. For multiple recipients, just separate each email address by a space character.

The report shows the activity since the last report. (Usually this is seven days, but you may opt for less frequent reports by sending email to Blossom Support.) If you find a search term that comes up empty, consider adding that term to pages appropriate for the term. If you don't want to change the displayed text, you can add the term to a page as a keyword or keyphrase.

During testing, you might want to turn off logging so that test searches don't show up in the logfile. Append "/nolog" to the search URL to turn off logging.

Displaying the Most Popular Searches

Some sites like to display the most popular searches, either for general visitors or just for internal usage. You can get a list of the historically most popular searches for a search index using the URL 
<https://searchBlossom.com/gethistory/ID
where "ID" is the search index ID. The list will be returned as a simple table, sorted by popularity, with each row being the terms of a popular search. Each line in the list is embedded in an anchor tag, so clicking on a line will run the search against your index. You can control the search by adding options after the ID. For example, 
<https://searchBlossom.com/gethistory/1000/style2/info3
gets history for index 1000. When a line in the history list is clicked, a search against index 1000 is run with the options "/style2/info3".

One way to display the history is to include it in an IFRAME, for example 

Top 20 searches<BR>
<IFRAME SRC="https://searchBlossom.com/gethistory/1000">
</IFRAME>
By default, the "gethistory" command returns 20 search queries, but you can change the number to anything between 1 and 100 using the "count" option. For example, the following IFRAME shows the top 50 search terms: 
<IFRAME SRC="https://searchBlossom.com/gethistory/1000?count=50">
</IFRAME>

[A word of caution. If you display search text to your visitors you may attract hackers who perform lots of searches to put their message on your website. A common exploit is to perform searches of URLs. If the URL shows up in your "popular searches" list, then Web-wide search engines like Google and Yahoo will think you are recommending that site. (For that reason, Blossom blocks most URL searches.)]