Re: [Summary-Talk] Problems with Search Words report

[Jason Linhart <jason@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

On 5/13/03 9:36 AM Bill_Royds@pch.gc.ca (Bill_Royds@pch.gc.ca) wrote:

>We are running Summary over our Intranet server logs (IIS5 with Cold 
>Fusion).
>I get these strange search terms below 
>(6e69616d2e36343334393239735f3630...)  in the search words report and 
>can't find them in the logs. Is there a 
>way to find out how they may have been created to filter them out?

The search terms might be encoded in the logs in a couple of different 
ways. Summary will lowercase any capital letters, so use a case 
independent search if you can. They could also be encoded in hex, "6" is 
"%36", "7" is "%37" and so on. Summary also removes various "illegal" 
characters, which would be difficult to guess. It is also possible, 
though less likely, for there to be other encodings which Summary would 
have decoded before displaying the field.

Summary uses a heuristic approach to detecting search phrases. This 
catches many search phrases that other programs miss, but it also pulls 
in the occasional bits of junk, like the numbers you are seeing. If you 
do find the log entries that created those terms please send them to me 
so I can adjust the rules for search phrase detection to avoid them. Or 
if you can narrow it down to a single log file of reasonable size but not 
an individual log entry you could send me the log and I will be able to 
find the specific log entries.

The only filtering you could do yourself would be to filter out the 
entire visit from the referrer that is creating those terms. That is 
probably not what you want to do though.

Jason

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Jason@Summary.Net
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Dr. Seuss books . . . can be read and enjoyed on several levels. For
example, 'One Fish Two Fish, Red Fish Blue Fish' can be deconstructed
as a searing indictment of the narrow-minded binary counting system.
  -- Peter van der Linden, Expert C Programming, Deep C Secrets
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