Old version history (V4.2 and earlier)

Click here for the latest version history


Note: We are no longer working on Version 4.2, as development have moved on to Version 6.0, but you can download the final 4.2 release (Build 1013) here and get the Users Guide for this version here. This is purely for supporting users of the previous version. We recommend upgrading to Version 6.0 where possible, as we have improved many aspects of Zoom and have addressed many issues based on user feedback.

Version 4.2.1013 (15 May 2006)

  • Fixed rare stalling bug when indexing from an unreliable internet connection or bad web server causing internet read faults. Previously, this may have caused Zoom to be stuck at a start point and not move on to the next one.

Version 4.2.1012 (26 April 2006)

  • Fixed crash bug caused by buffer overflow when indexing a large number of pages without meta descriptions or titles.
  • Updated configuration window to indicate that the skip underscore option applies for Offline Mode only.

Version 4.2.1011 (10 April 2006)

  • Fixed bug in the PHP and Javascript search scripts that caused some characters to be dropped from the search query when followed by a space.
  • Fixed bug with remembering last window size and position when a user closes the ZoomIndexer application while it is minimized or maximized. This caused Zoom to start up next time outside of the visible desktop (if it was minimized), or sized to the full size of the desktop (if it was maximized).
  • Fixed issue with the latest PDF plugin, where complicated layouts may cause words in the content to be indexed out of order.
  • Fixed bug with the "Unique words found" tally occasionally reporting inaccurately at the end of indexing in the "Index Summary".

Version 4.2.1010 (14 Feb 2006)

  • Fixed crash bug when indexing fails (due to out of memory, download error, etc.), and Zoom is attempting to clean up memory.
  • Fixed issues with pausing/resuming threads to avoid a race condition which may cause Zoom to stop after indexing and not finish.
  • Fixed bug when reporting file size for a file which the web server fails to report content-length.
  • Fixed bug with download progress bars in the Indexer window.
  • Fixed bug with Indexing Status sometimes reporting "URLs visited by spider" as "N/A" after indexing.
  • Fixed bug when attempting to load in too many skip words and/or scan extensions beyond the maximum allowed in the Configuration window.
  • Fixed bugs in search scripts (PHP, ASP, JS) dealing with the handling of punctuation characters in search queries.
  • Fixed bug in ASP script causing exact phrase searches to fail when the phrase occurs near the end of the web page.
  • Fixed bug in Javascript version when indexing words with "comma" enabled as a wordjoin character.
  • Fixed bug in Javascript version causing the indexed page score to be less than 255.

Version 4.2.1009 (30 Jan 2006)

  • Fixed crash bug introduced in build 4.2.1008 which caused "Access violation" errors when downloading files larger than the "Max file size limit" specified.

Version 4.2.1008 (27 Jan 2006)

  • Fixed ASP search script bug causing exclusion searches to be handled incorrectly.
  • Fixed bug with using custom titles from .DESC files for an Excel document (ie: titles in ".xls.desc" files).
  • Added error message and error handling for invalid security certificate when spider indexing a secure website.
  • Fixed Indexer issues when dealing with very short meta descriptions and titles containing HTML entities.
  • Fixed minor spelling suggestion issues for words containing the letter "X".
  • Fixed issues with Indexer when spider crawling multibyte encoded files on a slow server which caused some multibyte words to be corrupted.

Version 4.2.1007 (11 Jan 2006)

  • Corrected a translation mistake in the Dutch language file (Dutch.zlang).
  • Fixed bug in Indexer (Spider mode) when indexing multiple start points, and using the "Max. pages per start point" limit causing error messages such as "406 HTTP error" and "Server redirect error".
  • Fixed "unable to open file" error when attempting to open a log file in the same folder as the statistics report.
  • Fixed bug causing the Indexer to crash when attempting to index a file (in Offline Mode) which has an invalid path name that is over the limit of the Windows operating system.
  • Increased the length of the acceptable login name that can be entered in the "Authentication" configuration window to 40 (to allow for "DomainName\UserName" style logins).
  • Added error messages when a user attempts to enter a login or password that is too long.
  • Fixed possible problem with PHP script when magic quotes are enabled on the server.
  • Fixed issues in the PHP script with performing case insensitive searches for words in a foreign language (with UTF-8 encoding) such as Russian.
  • Fixed bug in PHP script which caused a warning message ("Warning: strpos() [function.strpos]: Empty delimiter") to appear occasionally, when spelling suggestions is enabled.
  • Fixed bug causing the Javascript version to not correctly match words which begin with a number, but contains an alphabetic character in a different uppercase/lowercase form than the search query.
  • Fixed "option explicit" compatibility in ASP script.

Version 4.2.1006 (30 Nov 2005)

  • Fixed crash bug causing the Indexer to crash when encountering a Content-Disposition header with an empty filename attribute.
  • Improved XSS patch in the Javascript version.

Version 4.2.1005 (24 Nov 2005)

  • Added support for Thai charset (windows-874) as well as iso-8859-9 and utf-85.
  • Fixed bug with not indexing titles from PPT files when "Use meta info from plugins" is enabled.
  • Fixed bug with incorrect skipped messages displayed in Offline Mode.
  • Fixed bugs with the statistic report generator (pie chart legend was occasionally cropped, and some log files were being incorrectly identified as being invalid.
  • Fixed bug with reporting the wrong line number in error messages when parsing searchwords log file.
  • Updated PHP version so that it can now be included from other PHP pages located in different directories.
  • Fixed minor bugs in the ASP version with the spelling suggestion feature and some other errors.
  • Patched XSS vulnerability in the Javascript version.

Version 4.2.1004 (27 Oct 2005)

  • Fixed bug with not correctly indexing plugin supported files linked via "file://" style links in Spider Mode.
  • Fixed bug with indexing incorrect title, description or datetime from "file://" linked documents.
  • Fixed bug with spelling suggestions in PHP search script.
  • Added verbose indexing messages to Offline Mode.
  • Added "application/x-shockwave-flash" content-type support
  • Added precautions to saved window positions so as to avoid the Indexer window starting outside of the visible desktop area.
  • Added error message when user attempts to add a category with a name which already exists.
  • Added support for <strong> and <em> tags, to avoid splitting words which contained these tags inside them.

Version 4.2.1003 (6 Oct 2005)

  • Fixed crash bug when a cylical synonym entry is entered (eg. "cat"->"feline" and "feline"->"cat"). Note that this is NOT necessary as the first synonym entry already implies equivalency both ways. It will now correctly ignore the redundant entry if it is entered.
  • Fixed a rare stalling bug when indexing a site which returns an unexpected HTTP redirect status code when no redirection is actually required.
  • Fixed search script bug which caused the "Jump to highlighting" parameter ("zoom_highlight=") to be omitted from the result links when "Title of page" is disabled from the "Results Layout" tab.
  • Added highlighting for page titles in the search results of the Javascript version.
  • Fixed Indexer bug with converting HTML entities before removing HTML tags which may have potentially caused some page content to be excluded from indexing.
  • Fixed Indexer bug which was listing more file extensions than specified in the currently loaded ZCFG file, at the very start of indexing (ie. "Will scan files with extensions: ...")

Version 4.2.1002 (21 Sept 2005)

  • Fixed bugs causing indexing to stall indefinitely until the user clicks "Stop".
  • Fixed bugs with drawing the index log when paused occasionally.
  • Added Javascript workaround for issue with Arabic (windows-1256) in the JS version.
  • Fixed bug with CGI not using the translated text for the message, "The following phrase contains very common words..."
  • Fixed minor bug with PHP spelling suggestions.
  • ASP script is now "Option Explicit" compatible.
  • Updated Portuguese language file with some translation corrections.

Version 4.2.1001 (23 Aug 2005)

  • Improved support for detecting file types of documents served via a download script. Zoom will now look at the Content-Disposition header even when the Content-Type is unsupported. This means it will now index files served with a content-type of "octet-stream" or "x-msdownload", etc.
  • Fixed "Help" button for Synonyms tab in the Configuration window.
  • Fixed crash bug in CGI search when using spelling suggestions.
  • Updated ASP script to avoid variable names conflicting with other scripts if you are embedding search.asp in other ASP scripts.
  • Removed charset enforcement in the Javascript version. This allows the Russian/Cyrillic workaround with UTF-8 parameter decoding to work correctly.

Version 4.2.1000 (17 Aug 2005)

  • Synonyms: This feature allows you to specify synonyms, variations of words, common misspellings, etc. and allow you to map them to an equivalent word in the index. This can be very helpful if many users on your site are searching for names which are different to the ones you used on your website, but have the same meaning. For example, the word "question" could be made equivalent to "inquiry,enquiry,query,questions", so that when a user searches for any of the aforementioned words, they would get the same results.
  • Exclusion/negative searches: This allows your users to perform search queries which exclude a certain keyword by preceding the search term with a hyphen (eg. "cats -dog" would return all pages containing the word "cat" but not the word "dog").
  • Improved spelling suggestions: We have improved the spelling suggestions algorithm to provide more accurate and useful suggestions when a user's search returns few results. It will also return multiple suggestions for single word searches.
  • Includes new language files: Japanese, Russian, and Portuguese.
  • Validated XHTML 1.0 Transitional output.
  • Added HTML entities for yacute, thorn, times, oelig, scaron, yuml, and more.
  • Fixed various issues with "Jump to highlighting" script (highlight.js).
  • Fixed issues with searching for an exact phrase in the meta description or title but the individual words of the phrase can be found in the content of the document.
  • Fixed issues causing the warning message "Template file has different charset" to be shown incorrectly (eg. when both the template and Indexer is set to use UTF-8).
  • Prevents Zoom from remembering Window positions which are outside the visible area of the desktop.
  • Fixed several bugs in the Javascript version, including broken "Next" links when using UTF-8.
  • Fixed bug causing "aaaaa"s to appear in the context description.
  • Fixed bug with some HTML entities in the URL failing to be converted.
  • Fixed issue on Windows 98 with plugins causing a DOS window to appear when processing a file.
  • More bug fixes and changes.

Version 4.1.1003 (11 Jul 2005)

  • Fixed bugs with Indexer failing to remember window positions and "show wizard on startup" settings.
  • Fixed bug with Indexer failing to locate default template file, when "Custom script source path" is enabled.
  • Fixed CGI bugs for searching UTF-8 text on a Windows server and some potential crash issues.
  • Fixed ASP script for searching the last entry in the dictionary.

Version 4.1.1002 (1 Jul 2005)

  • Optimized the CGI search function, most significantly improving performance for large sites of around 100,000 pages or more.
  • Fixed timezone bug in the CGI version which caused some dates to be shown incorrectly.
  • Changed meta descriptions in results to show "..." only if it has been truncated
  • Improved detection of content-type headers - fixes problems with "Unsupported content-type" for some file formats.
  • Added error messages if FTP username or password is too long.
  • Fixed some memory leaks in the Indexer.
  • Updated Italian language file.

Version 4.1.1001 (27 Jun 2005)

  • Fixed ASP search script which was incorrectly encoding the query in HTML, and causing exact phrase matching to not work.
  • Added detection of non-supported Content-Type headers, which allow Zoom to ignore download scripts which may serve binary files such as .exe or images instead of indexing them as text.
  • Added decoding of URL escape characters (eg. %20) in filenames when they are used as a page title (eg. PDF files with no meta title information or .desc file).

Version 4.1.1000 (22 Jun 2005)
Version 4.1 offers many improvements based on user requested features, further adding to the power of Zoom, while maintaining the ease of use and search speed inherent in 4.0. With the new weighting options, it is also now capable of producing more accurate and relevant search results than ever.

  • Automatic "content density" weighting adjustment: automatically adjusts the weighting of words found in a file depending on the density of its content. This helps prevent large files (such as PDF documents with 50+ pages) from always appearing as the most relevant result, and gives greater priority to smaller documents.
  • Weighting options for heading tags: increase or decrease the importance of text found in <H1> and <H2> tags.
  • Weighting options for filenames: increase or decrease the importance of search text found in filenames.
  • Support for ASP.NET: you can now create an ASP.NET (.aspx) search page to integrate Zoom into your ASP.NET website seamlessly. Find out more here.
  • Determine file types by "content-type" header: This allows Zoom to index PDF, DOC, and other file types served by a server-side download script (eg. http://www.mysite.com/getfile.php?fileid=123)
  • New DjVu plugin support: allows you to index and search DjVu files (".djvu")
  • Support "Last-Modified" meta date tag: allows you to specify date/time for dynamically generated pages easily for the "Sort by date" option.
  • Follow "file://" style links: this option allows spider mode indexing on Intranets to scan and index documents on the web server as well as the file network.
  • Support for multiple category patterns: allows you to specify multiple patterns for each category to match files by.
  • New index log window options: allow you to right click on a line in the index log and copy the line to the clipboard, or open the URL in your browser, etc.
  • Option to enable or disable the use of cookies for spider mode indexing
  • Import categories from CSV file format
  • New "Max words per file" optional limit: allows you to specify the maximum number of words to index from each file.
  • "Jump to match ..." script (highlight.js) now support exact phrases and UTF-8.
  • Indexer remembers window position and size.
  • Added join character options for colon and ampersand characters.
  • New language files for Spanish and Norwegian.
  • Many bug fixes and other improvements to further ensure reliability and performance.

Version 4.0.1016 (10 Mar 2005)

  • Fixed errors ("Warning: compilation failed", "Expected ... in regular expression") when results highlighting is enabled, and search query includes parentheses, braces, and other non-alphanumeric characters in PHP, ASP, and JS scripts
  • Fixed bug with corrupting spider URL when user edits start points
  • Fixed crash bug when importing start points from a text file with blank lines
  • Fixed a number of potential crash bugs with text buffers in memory
  • Removed extraneous radio button when using the CGI search function with "Basic" search form
  • Updated documentation for "Jump to match and highlight" instructions

Version 4.0.1014 (8 Mar 2005)

  • Added "Jump to match and highlight within documents" support. See link for more information.
  • Updated language files for Italian and German with minor corrections
  • Updated CGI search function for XHTML 1.0 compliancy
  • Removed grey-out for ASP option in the wizard when "create a search engine for an Intranet/CD-ROM" is selected.
  • Updated Javascript version to encode query in links

Version 4.0.1013 (3 Mar 2005)

  • Improved XHTML 1.0 Transitional compliancy for default template HTML and search script output for PHP, ASP, and Javascript.
  • Fixed crash bug caused by "index meta author" option is enabled and a page with a very long meta keyword tag is encountered. Also increased the maximum size for meta keywords.
  • Fixed bug with "Wizard suggestion" window occasionally popping up at the end of indexing when running as a scheduled task.
  • Fixed double lines appearing in Index Log when saved to file
  • Fixed bug with appending extra slash when base URL is specified in backslashes (eg. UNC locations)

Version 4.0.1012 (24 Feb 2005)

  • Added Swedish language file (Swedish.zlang)
  • Indexer no longer aborts indexing a page if it comes across a blank href values (eg. <a href="">)
  • Fixed rare Windows 98 crash bug with certain PDF files (and other plugin formats) when the filename contains certain non-standard characters.
  • Fixed Javascript issue when there are multiple spaces before or after the search query (and substring search is enabled)
  • Added error messages in the Indexer log when it encounters some HTTP errors (eg. "500 - Internal Server Error")
  • Updated CGI search with support for the "results" CSS class.
  • Updated ASP script to support use with HSP (a 3rd party application) which allows you to run ASP on a CD.
  • Removed "charset mismatch" warning if no charset is found in the HTML template.
  • Some minor changes to avoid issues with Zip drives being browsed in the "Select folder" window, whilst there is no disk in the drive.

Version 4.0.1011 (16 Feb 2005)

  • Added real-time memory estimation in the "Limits" tab of the configuration window. This provides you with an estimation of how much memory is required as you change the values.
  • Comments added to the settings output file (eg. settings.php), to warn users not to edit the file manually.
  • Fixed Javascript bug where searching with "match all search words" with the use of wildcards would return results matching only the wildcard term.
  • Fixed bug when user overflows "max file size" value. "Max file size" value is also now converted to KB (1024 bytes) rather than kB (1000 bytes). This means that when you load in existing configurations, this setting will appear to be slightly lower than before.
  • Added a 60 second time out for HTTP requests if no response is sent by the server.
  • Encoded characters (eg. %20) in URLs are no longer removed or converted. This should help users indexing sites with foreign characters in the URLs.
  • Fixed bug with finding hypertext links broken up by new line characters.

Version 4.0.1010 (7 Feb 2005)

  • Added "Use PASV mode" option to the FTP and configuration windows.
  • Added Italian language file (Italian.zlang) and some minor updates to the French language file (French.zlang)
  • Removed errorneous semi-colon in the default "search_template.html" CSS. This was causing the ".summary" style to be ignored in Mozilla browsers previously.
  • Added support for HTML entities such as &quot; to be used inside a meta description.
  • Added support for meta tags with attributes specified by single quotation marks (and containing double quote marks as the content value) or vice versa.
  • Fixed bug where BASE HREF tag enclosed in a HTML comment block, was not ignored.

Version 4.0.1009 (31 Jan 2005)

  • Fixed bug in build 1008 which caused links with HTML code in uppercase to be skipped by the spider.

Version 4.0.1008 (27 Jan 2005)

  • Added "Do not upload search template file" option, for users of website generators (eg. NetObjects Fusion) that wish to manage the uploading/publishing of their search template with their website generator.
  • Fixed bug with spider not following some links or frames with certain names or attribute values.
  • Improved spider crawling process when hunting for links, especially pages with IFrames and embedded frames.
  • Offline mode now allows for base URLs that end with a question mark (eg. "goto.php?"). This allows you to pass the links to your site's files as parameters to a script.
  • Added warning message when the default category name is empty. You must specify a default category name when categories are enabled.
  • Added a missing </p> tag in the ASP and Javascript output.

Version 4.0.1007 (20 Jan 2005)

  • Fixed Windows 98 crash bug when using the "Import" option in the "Additional start points" window
  • Fixed issue in Javascript version which displayed a different year for search results when viewed in Netscape/Mozilla/Firefox (eg. it would display "105" instead of "2005").
  • Fixed bug where the "Save configuration" function would sometimes save to the default configuration file rather than the currently loaded configuration file.
  • Added error message when no "Indexing options" are selected in the configuration window.

Version 4.0.1006 (18 Jan 2005)

  • Improved support for extracting meta information from plugin supported file formats.
  • Fixed bug in the Preview panel of the "Results options" tab, which showed context description even when Javascript is selected.
  • Improved support for avoiding sample HTML in PDF documents being displayed in context descriptions.
  • Fixed bugs with indexing HTML code when indexing some plugin file formats such as PDF, PPT, XLS.
  • Fixed bug with not being able to disable titles from being indexed, when "Title" is unchecked in the "Index options" tab.

Version 4.0.1005 (14 Jan 2005)

  • Added support for RTF file format (requires new rtf2txt plugin)
  • Added support for meta information from PowerPoint files (requires updated ppthtml plugin)
  • Improved support for HTML or sample-HTML code appearing in context description
  • Fixed Windows 98 bug, where the Langauge (zlang) file dropdown is disabled.
  • Fixed a bug with the "Use meta information from plugin" feature which caused title and description to not be extracted correctly for display in the search results.
  • Fixed bug with the Javascript version not using the translated text for the "Search" button
  • Fixed bug with the Javascript version failing to retrieve GET parameters when "zoom_query" is not specified, eg. "search.html?zoom_per_page=50"

Version 4.0.1004 (7 Jan 2005)

  • Fixed ASP bug causing "problem: page number too big" error
  • Fixed Windows 98 bugs which caused the index log window to not display, and crashes after "Save Index Log to file..." and Load/Save configurations
  • Added detection of password protected DOC files (requires word2txt version 1.3)
  • Added support for meta information from DOC files (requires word2txt version 1.3)
  • Included new Dutch and Danish language files for the search page
  • Fixed additional space character appearing in categories for the CGI/Linux search results page
  • Fixed bug with "zoom_plugin.in" appearing as a page title for XLS files in search results when "use meta information from plugins" is enabled
  • Fixed bug with truncating FTP usernames over 20 characters
  • Fixed bug with multiple start points remaining after loading a different config file
  • Fixed bug with "Index author" option remaining disabled in configuration window
  • Fixed bug with scheduler failing to schedule with configuration files outside of the program directory

Version 4.0.1002 (13 Dec 2004)

  • Includes new Croatian language file for the search page
  • Fixed bug in ASP script when searching for single character words with Spelling Suggestion enabled
  • Fixed crash bug with FTP uploading, when an upload fails (due to incorrect login information, or when a user hits cancel), and user attempts to upload immediately afterwards.
  • Fixed bug with URLs containing two '?' characters, which caused the Indexer to mis-identify the file extension.
  • Fixed crash bug when output directory does not exist
  • Fixed bug with meta description tag overriding the .desc meta description
  • Fixed bug with sometimes forgetting "Wizard On Startup" setting

Version 4.0.1000 (9 Dec 2004)

Zoom Search Engine Version 4.0 introduces many new features and an overhaul of the indexer internals to provide more powerful searching options, better performance (indexes larger sites with the same hardware, and indexes them faster), and improved usability.

  • Multi-threaded downloading: Dramatically improve the speed of spider mode indexing, by allowing multiple downloads and indexing to occur simultaneously. [screenshot]
  • Reduced memory usage: Allows users to index much larger sites than before, with around 30% less memory used.
  • Sort by date or relevance: Option to sort search results by date and show file dates.
  • Spelling suggestions: Provide users with spelling suggestions or a similar word which is more popular, when few results are found.
  • Built-in FTP uploading: Zoom can now upload the search files after indexing, directly to your web server. No need for an external FTP client, and can be configured to automatically upload after every index. [screenshot]
  • Built-in Zoom Scheduler: You can now schedule Zoom to automatically index, or generate reports for your site, directly from Zoom, with a few mouse clicks. [screenshot]
  • Step-by-step wizard: an easy-to-follow guide which helps new users get started setting up the Indexer for their site. Also useful for more experienced users who just want to get something up and running as soon as possible. [screenshot]
  • Shockwave Flash plugin: Index and search through Shockwave Flash, and FlashPaper files and support spider crawling Flash-based sites (it will successfully follow links from Flash-based navigation menus etc). [plugins page ]
  • Frames and IFRAME spider indexing: The spider will now crawl pages and follow links within frames and IFRAMES.
  • Modify or translate search page text: Zoom now allows you to translate the text generated by the search page (eg. "No results found", "Search results for....", etc.), without having to modify the search script. You can translate your entire search function to a different language, or just customize the text as you see fit. French and German translation files have been included with this release.
  • More flexible indexing options: Select exactly what you want to index, from title of page, filename, page content, meta description, meta keywords and meta author
  • More flexible results layout options: Select which element to display in the search results with a simple check box.
  • More boosting features: Give you greater control over which page gets higher priority in the search results. New ZOOMPAGEBOOST options allow you to boost a page's importance. Also, more flexible word boosting (-5 to +5) options for words that appear within a page title, meta description or keywords.
  • Improved international language options: accent characters will now appear in the context descriptions (in their original form), even when accent insensitivity is enabled.
  • Multiple start points for offline mode
  • Multiple base URLs per spider start point: Each start point can have multiple base URLs which allow links to be considered "internal". For example, http://www.mysite.com/ can have both "http://www.mysite.com/" and "http://private.mysite.com/" be its base URL.
  • New statistical report options: List search terms sorted by popularity, append unique date/time to filenames, and specify a different folder for reports to be uploaded to.
  • Support for retrieving meta information from PDF files (meta description, document title, document author, etc.)
  • Improved template management: Easier to maintain multiple sites with different search page templates. No longer necessary to edit the template source file or to make multiple copies. Just directly modify the search template in the output directory!
  • Highlighting now also applies to search result titles.
  • Control which messages appear in the Indexer log window. Progress bars for downloading messages.
  • Many other bug fixes and improvements based on users' requests and beta testers feedback.

Click here for more old version history (Zoom Version 3.1 or earlier)

Click here for the latest version history

Return to the main page to find out more about Zoom