Search Questions
- How do I search within results?
Sometimes a search is in the right area but gives too many results. To narrow a search all you need to do is add more words to the end of your query. This gives you a new query that will return a subset of the pages returned by the too-broad query.
- How can I restrict my search?
We are constantly seeking to build upon our search capabilities, but we currently support this kind of restriction only by a feature called “Top Options”. When you type search terms into search bar, you will see all the relevant results, but sometimes you may want to go deeper in your search. “Top Options” allows you to look at your search result in more detail, so this way you can get much closer to your desired product that you have been searching for.
- How do I remove previous searches when I begin a new query?
VidaMonti does not save any search history.
- How can I set the default number of hits to 10,20,50 or 100?
For the time being, this functionality is not supported. We hope to make your search experience so efficient so for now, every page where your search results appear contain 100 results. If there are more than 100 results, then you can navigate easily to other pages to view more results.
- Why does it seem like I receive more results when I refine a search?
VidaMonti has numerous technical features for optimizing its performance. Please note that when you did a VidaMonti search for your first query, you were not told that VidaMonti had exactly x number of matches; rather, you were notified of at least x number of matches. In fact, VidaMonti may have had significantly more than x number of hits for the first search.
- How are query results listed?
VidaMonti’s order of hits is determined by a combination of several factors. Please check out our Why Use VidaMonti page for more detail.
Webmaster Questions
- Do I need to submit updated and/or outdated links and pages?
VidaMonti updates its index as often as necessary, so updated, or outdated link submissions are not necessary. We should be able to pick them up during each crawl.
- How do I submit multiple pages?
Please visit our Add Your Website to VidaMonti form to input your URLs. Only the top-level domain is necessary; you do not need to submit each individual product page. Our crawler, VidaMontibot, will be able to find the rest!
- Why doesn’t VidaMonti index any of my product pages?
Although we index huge number of product pages and are constantly working to increase the number of product pages we include, we don’t guarantee that we’ll crawl all the pages of a specific ecommerce site. VidaMonti doesn’t crawl all the product pages on the web, and we don’t index all the product pages we crawl. It’s perfectly normal for not all the product pages on an ecommerce site to be indexed. VidaMonti looks at the link’s interconnectedness among product pages and allows the open, vast nature of the ecommerce data on the internet to yield the most relevant search results.
- What is the amount of time VidaMonti takes to index a URL once it is submitted?
Depending on the timing of the submission, the amount of the data on the URL and our crawl, the entire process can be anywhere from a few hours to a few weeks.
- Where is my product’s title?
The product’s title appears on the search result of that specific product in a way that can be noticed very easily.
VidaMontibot Technology Questions
- How do I request VidaMonti not to crawl parts or all of my site?
There is a standard for robot exclusion at https://www.robotstxt.org/orig.html. You can put a file on your server called robots.txt that can exclude VidaMontibot or other “web crawlers.” VidaMontibot has a user-agent of “VidaMontibot”. There is another standard for telling robots not to index a web page or follow links on it, which may be more helpful in some cases, since it can be used more conveniently on a page-by-page basis. It involves placing a “META” element into a page of HTML, and is described here. Remember, changing your server’s robots.txt file or changing the “META” elements on its pages will not cause an immediate change in what results VidaMonti returns. It is likely that it will take a while for any changes you make to propagate to VidaMonti’s next index of the web.
- Why is VidaMontibot asking for a file called robots.txt which is not on my server?
Robots.txt is a standard document that can tell VidaMontibot not to download some or all information from your web server. For information on how to create a robots.txt file, see in here.
- Why do you have to add a piece code into robots.txt file of my ecommerce site?
To make sure 100% that your products along with your ecommerce site will be found on VidaMonti, it’s advisable to add the user-agent of “VidaMontibot” into the robots.txt file of your ecommerce site. Except your products page, any other page can be disallowed to not be indexed by VidaMonti crawlers.
- Why is VidaMontibot trying to download incorrect links from my server?
It is a property of the web that many links will be broken or outdated at any given time. Whenever anyone types a link incorrectly that points to your site or fails to update their product pages to reflect changes in your server, VidaMontibot will try to download an incorrect link from your site. Also, this is why you may get hits on a machine that is not even a web server.
- Why is VidaMontibot downloading information from our “secret” web server?
It is almost impossible to keep a web server secret by not publishing any links to it. As soon as someone follows a link from your “secret” server to another web server, it is likely that your “secret” URL is in the referrer tag, and it can be stored and possibly published by the other web server in its referrer log. So, if there is a link to your “secret” web server or page on the web anywhere, it is likely that VidaMontibot and other “web crawlers” will find it.
- Why isn’t VidaMontibot obeying my robots.txt file?
In order to save bandwidth VidaMontibot only downloads the robots.txt file every week or so. So, it may take a while for VidaMontibot to learn of any changes that might have been made to your robots.txt file. Also, VidaMontibot is distributed on several machines. Each of these keeps its own record of your robots.txt file. Also, check that your syntax is correct against the standard at: https://www.robotstxt.org/orig.html. If there still seems to be a problem, please let us know, and we will correct it.
- How do I register my ecommerce site with VidaMontibot so it will be indexed?
See the Add Your Website to VidaMonti form.
- Why are there hits from multiple machines at VidaMonti.com all with user-agent VidaMontibot?
VidaMontibot was designed to be distributed on several machines to improve performance and scale as the web grows. Also, to cut down on bandwidth usage we would like to run many crawlers which run on machines close to the sites they are indexing in the network.
