Thunderstone Search Appliance Manual

Results per Site

Syntax: an integer select box and Yes/No button

The Max setting controls the maximum results per site per page to display. For large profiles with many pages (and thus results) per site, setting Results per Site can increase the results variety shown on a single page, by replacing some same-site results with lesser-ranked but different-site results from subsequent pages.

When results are limited to N per site, no more than N results for any given site will be shown on any given page. Results past N for a site are suppressed, and results from new sites (that are not past N yet) added, until the page is full. Once the page is complete, the results are reordered: the second and later results from a site are moved up under the first result from that site, indented, and followed by a More results for site link. The next page's results will be obtained by the same process, resuming at the point in raw results left off by the previous page. Note that a given site may appear on subsequent pages (if there are more results for it), but its results that were suppressed for the previous page will not be shown (because they are visible via the previous page's More results for site link). Also, since there are now two degrees of navigation through the results - standard pagination, plus the More results for site links - not all of the total results counted may be shown via pagination: the rest are shown via More results for site.

Note also that setting Results per Site to other than Unlimited can increase search time, as potentially much more than one page of raw results must be obtained and suppressed, and results must be regrouped.

The Allow override button controls whether the search user can override the profile's Results per Site limit on the Advanced Search form. This can be set to N to prevent the potential delay of grouping by site, or Y to allow the user to set a custom value. For profiles that are Meta Search back-ends, if the front-end Meta Search is using Results per Site, all the back-ends should have Allow override set to Y so that the front-end's value can be used, for consistency.