Hi Paul Dain,
Sure, we can provide that information.
This is something like a new feature, introduced in Service Pack 1. This file is used by the search engine, for better handling of the content, while indexing. Here is an example code found in that file :
| <fields> |
| <field name="title" weight="1" |
| indexAttribute="" filterTag="title" filterAttributes="" /> |
| <field name="keywords" weight="1" |
indexAttribute="content" filterTag="meta"
filterAttributes="name:keywords;" /> |
| <field name="description" weight="1" |
indexAttribute="content" filterTag="meta"
filterAttributes="name:description;" /> |
| </fields> |
As we can see, here are 3 different fields - title, keywords and description. These are also the meta tags we can find in every html page. Every field has a
weight property. The search engine spiders through the pages, indexing the content and giving weight of different part of the content of the page. This weight depends on the values set in this file. Later, when you search for something, the results are sorted based on that weight. The results (pages) where you have your "
search term" with higher weight, are first in the list. The search engine also respects the repeat ratio of the
search term in the pages.
This way you can exclude certain content from a page from indexing, or give higher priority to the keywords of a page, even if the keywords are not listed (because the keyword field is a meta tag). By certain content I mean that you can even exclude content within given tag or within tag with specified class.
Excluding, for example, the indexing of the title tag of the page would look like this :
| <field name="title" weight="-1" |
| indexAttribute="" filterTag="title" filterAttributes="" /> |
Please note, that weight property has a negative attribute. Every field with such weight will not appear in the search results at all.
It is true that our documentation lacks this information. We will definitely work to change this fact, and provide a full information on that file.
All the best,
Georgi
the Telerik team