Feature Descriptions
Site Scanning: HTTP site
spidering, HTTPS (secure sockets support), Disk Scanning of local and
network drives, FTP scanning of Web sites accessible using FTP (FTP Scan
is available in MAXAMINE Knowledge Platform and MAXAMINE Process Analyst).
The spider follows all kinds of links and relationships including regular
links, image maps, images, and static and dynamically created JavaScript
links. Sites with session IDs can be scanned. Scanning can penetrate HTML
forms with the "autoforms authenticator" available in MAXAMINE Knowledge
Platform and MAXAMINE Process Analyst.
Site Visualization: Multi-layed Web maps, site
directory chooser, can move Web objects on map, multiple Web object layout,
can hide many levels of detail from maps, can have multiple Web maps open,
can view in and out links of Web objects, can calculate shortest navigation
paths on Web maps, can view critical results from reports and from the
search engine on Web maps. Browse meta tags directly from Web maps.
Navigation Analysis: "Hard To Reach Page"
report shows shortest navigation path from home page to every other page
in site and highlights critical navigation problems. "Non Returning
Page" report highlights pages that can be reached from the home page
but do not provide a return path back to the home page. Visual of the shortest
navigation path viewable from the Web maps. Visual inspection of all navigation
paths.
Site Quality Management: Broken link report,
external (foreign page) integrity report, meta data analysis report, Slow
pages report. Hard to Reach Page report. Non returning page report. Redundant
(duplicated) images and documents and document report. Site change report
highlights differences between any two scans of a Web sites - the differences
are represented visually and in comprehensive reports. Comprehensive Key
Page and Site Summary report.
Structural Search: Can perform a search and
obtain a list of matching results, found pages are highlighted on the
Web maps. Web objects can be located based on any of the following attributes
:- document title, file name, directory, domain name, meta tag attribute,
meta tag value, file size range, range of the number of links to foreign
pages in page, range of the number of links going into the page, range
of the number of links going out of the page, range of the number of hits
on that page (as determined by the current traffic analysis query), range
of the number of posts applied to that page, range based on the date that
the page was changed, any error code that the page returned, whether the
page is and index page, whether the page is an image, whether the page
is a document, whether the page has one or more meta tags, whether the
page contains one or more forms, whether the page acts as a "parent frame"
for other frames, whether the page is involved as a "child frame" for
a frame set, whether the page is a foreign or externally linked page,
whether the page returned a 404 error, whether the page returned any error.
Meta Data Analysis: MAXAMINE products allow
meta attributes and values of any Web page to be inspected directly from
the Web maps using the "right-click Meta Tag" menu. This allows you to
examine your site and quickly determine the meta tags on any Web pages.
MAXAMINE products also allow Meta Data Searches to be performed. You can
search for any meta attribute or meta tag value using wildcards and the
matching Web pages are listed. You can drill down on the listed Web pages
to the Web maps, or directly to the Web page in your Web browser.
Scheduled Scanning and Analysis: MAXAMINE
Knowledge Platform supports a visual scheduling environment where scans
can be scheduled at any time. Reports can be run after the scan and then
published to a Web site or emailed out to any number of recipients. MAXAMINE
Process Analyst provide command line parameters that allow scans to be
run, reports to be generated, and the reports can be emailed out to a
list of recipients. MAXAMINE Process Analyst must be run in conjunction
with a time-based scheduling package.
Customer Experience Reports See the section
on "Site Quality Management".
Site Comparison Reports A site comparison
report allows an organization to compare any two "snapshots" or scan images
of a Web site together. This reports shows which pages and Web objects
have been added, deleted and modified since the last snapshot. The reports
also detail any changes in the number of links in each page. This report
can be used to measure development progress at any two time points in
the development lifecycle of a Web site. The site change reports use powerful
checksums to determine if any two pages have changed. This is important
for security purposes because two images, for example, may have the same
time and date stamp and the same file size but might be completely different.
These differences would be picked by by the MAXAMINE checksum calculations.
Traffic Analysis: Server log file forms supported
include :- Microsoft Internet Information Server (IIS) v3 and v4 and compatible
formats, W3C (World Wide Web Consortium), NCSA common and extended, Lotus
Domino variant of NCSA extended format, NCSA based non-standard formats
(format string must be present). Most Web servers provide or can be configured
to provide at least one of these formats. Single or multiple log files
can be analyzed simultaneously. Log file interleaving is automatically
preformed for load balancing Web server logs. Wild card log file specification
can be performed. Log files can be filtered by any time and date range;
this allows "situation analysis" to be preformed where traffic
is measured over a precise interval. Images hits can be analyzed or ignored.
The log file analysis with determine link hits even when a "referrer"
field is not present in the log file.
Traffic Visualization: View hit link traffic
on the Web maps. Color coding is used to indicate the extent of hits to
a page, or the extent to which clients have followed a link. This allows
customers to be visually tracked through the Web site and actual link paths
show the extent of traffic along that link. Form posts are represented
using different coloring.
Traffic Reporting: Reports include graphs and
comprehensive detail section. Daily access statistics, hourly access statistics,
external referrer domains, geographic usage, missing objects, most accessed
directories, most accessed files, most accessed files by directory, most
accessed forms, most accessed forms showing queries, most accessed links.
The geographic report is highly accurate and indicates the geographic
distribution of the customers who use the site. Raw IP numbers in the
log file are even resolved back to a country.
Visual Site Re-engineering: A powerful method
of examining and re-engineering the current structure of the site using
Web maps, and provides a CAD like environment where site changes can be
modelled. This includes :- deleting pages and links, adding pages and
links, annotating pages and links, nominating traffic corridors, and grouping
pages together into functional groups. All of these changes can be applied
using a "blueprinting" pallette using simple mouse and drag
and drop operations. A blueprint report can be generated that summarizes
all of the changes to the site and can be given to the content creation
team for incorporation in the site. Changes to linking structures using
blueprinting affects the "Hard To Reach Page Report". This means
that additional and deleted links can be modelled with respect to site
accessibility.
Enterprise Cross-Site Analysis:The MAXAMINE
Knowledge Platform and MAXAMINE Process Analyst allow a group of domains
to be scanned and analyzed as a logical collection of interlinked domains.
This allows an enterprise that must integrate multiple domains, optimize
traffic flow between domains and to maintain linking and navigational
consistency between domains. When a scan is performed any number of domains
can be specified as a logical grouping. When the scan is complete each
domain is accessible through the Web maps, and links between domains are
shown. The traffic analysis takes into account multiple domains and log
files from each domain can be added. The traffic visualization will show
inter-domain traffic links clearly on the Web maps to allow an analysis
of how customers migrate between your corporate Webs. The traffic reports
are organized neatly into separate domains.
Content Searching: Full text indexes are generated
after a site scan. The indexes allow basic and advanced text searching.
Text searches can be "AND'd" with any number of the "structural
search conditions". Text searches include word search, exact phrase,
near, wildcard. Word stemming is supported. Complex search expressions
can be formed including ANDs, ORs and NOTs. Bracketing can be used to
control search expression evaluation. Simple search builder provided.
Advanced search area allows complex search expressions to be directly
keyed in. Query optimization performed. Proprietary "relevancy engine"
allows very complex search expressions to be optimized and evaluated often
without requiring access the bulk of the records affected by each expression
component. This partial evaluation results in blinding fast queries and
ensures that the most relevant documents are located in the first result
set. Further results can be requested and the query will incrementally
re-execute with less relevant results returned. Typical search execution
speeds for compound searches on repositories of millions of words measure
just 10-30ms.
Concept Visualization and Analysis: Concepts
are learned by word association. For example if "tax", "audit"
and "IRS" appear near each other in a number of documents then
a "tax-audit-IRS" concept may be formed. The concept is then
associated with the most similar other concept of the same level, eg.
"accounting-profit-balance-loss" to form a higher level concept
of "tax-audit-IRS-accounting-profit-balance-loss". This association
forms a binary concept tree. This tree is automatically generated and
displayed to the user when requested on the search interface. The concept
tree displays how concepts match a given search using colors. Parts of
the concept tree can be collapsed/expanded by the user. Documents which
match the search and the concept can be viewed from the relevant leaf
of the concept tree. Documents can be drilled down on directly from the
concept tree to the Web browser.
Directory Tree Visualization and Analysis:
Once a search is performed a directory tree is produced with the domain
of the Web site as the root of the directory, and subdirectories appearing
as branches. The directories that have matching result pages are highlighted
according to a simple color-coded relevance scheme. This scheme allows
the user to examine which directories matched the search and it allows
the user to open up the subdirectories and then browse to a Web page based
on the area of the Web site that the user is seeking. This prevents the
long "lists" of ranked documents that can be confusing to the user and
allows an intuitive way of drilling down to the right information.
Web Based Search Interface: A
Web-based search interface can be used to perform content searches of
a Web site. A simple and advanced search interface is provided with the
features available as described in the "Content Searching"
section. The "Concept Visualization trees" and "Directory Visualization trees" are also provided in the Web interface.
Client Server Architecture: A client-server
architecture allows the server to run on a powerful server. Many users
can connect to the server through a Java application on any client computer.
The server performs the scanning, loading and manipulation of Web maps,
reporting, and computation and reports the results back to the client.
Multiple servers can run on a single server. The query server is multi-threaded
to extract maximum query performance. Search results are cached on the
server and results are communicated to the client in manageable chunks,
this offers good network performance and reduces the memory and computational
requirements at the client end.
Multi User Support: The server can support
any number of users. Clients are connected via TCP/IP across the network.
MAXAMINE Site Ratings: These ratings rate your
site (out of a possible score of 100) in the areas of Customer, Link Integrity,
External Link Integrity, Page Accessibility,
Content Cacheability, Visitor Retention, Page Speed, Return to Home Page and Meta Data Coverage.
On the rating graphs you can see how your site compares with the industry standard.
Client Platform Independence: The client
software will run on any machine that is running a Java Virtual Machine
with the popular Java Swing extensions. This includes practically all
platforms including Windows, Solaris, Linux and Apple Macintosh.
Ecommerce Form and Back-end
Database Testing: Automated-form submission allows testing of ecommerce
engines. By automatically submiting online forms to emulate customers
behaviors on a Web site, allows you to determine the most efficient navigation
paths, form submission errors, server loading, analyze ecommerce transactions,
security breaches, customer experiences, form scope and usability tracking.
A company can ensure that all of their ecommerce back end services such
as order forms, stock queries, feedback forms, product search forms are
operational 24 hours a day, 7 days a week and be advised when a form "goes
down" or starts producing errors. Form errors can lead to customer
dissatisfaction, lost orders, revenue loss and a tarnished company image.
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Knowledge Platform
