What is new in Portal Search for this version of portal

General enhancements to Portal Search

Portal Search has been enhanced with the following new features in WebSphere Portal Express Version 6.1:

• Common search administration for search services, search collections, and search scopes.
• Search Services: Portal Search now allows you to integrate multiple Search Services in your portal. For example, you can define additional search services, such as one or more remote Portal Search Services. You can administer these search services from a single administration interface. Two search services are provided by default:
  • Portal Search Service.
  • Default Content Model Search Service. This is used to query documents saved in the Portal Document Manager.
  For more details about administering search services Managing search services.
• Search Scopes. Search scopes are available for users in the Search Center portlet to allow for more focused searches. Users can select these scopes from a selection menu provided with the search box in the theme and with the Search Center portlet. Search scopes replace the tabs of the Search Center portlet of the previous portal version. The scopes allow for more flexibility as they are not tied to a specific search collection. As an administrator you can create and maintain the scopes. A search scope can be used to filter search results based on the following elements:
  • A specific search location or content source.
  • The type of content. For example, you can filter search results to return only PDF documents.
  • Elements related to the contents of a document or page, for example the document author or a text string in the title field.
  For more information about this refer to Managing search scopes and custom links.
• Custom links. You can add custom links with Web link shortcuts to search locations. This enables users to do direct searches to popular Web search engines, such as Google or Yahoo! Users can select the custom links with the search box in the theme or in the Search Center portlet. For more details about this refer to Managing search scopes and custom links.
• Portal Search administration. The Portal Search administration has been enhanced to support the new search services and scopes. The administration of search collections has been improved and allows for easier access to major administrative tasks.
• Improved searchability of the portal site:
  • Portal can now be crawled and searched more securely by external search engines, such as Google and Yahoo!
  • A sitemap portlet is available so that the crawlers can collect portal pages more efficiently.
• Improved end user Search portlets:
  • The Search Scopes allow users to search content by specific criteria.
  • The Search Center portlet has been updated; it now has a pull-down selection list for the search scopes instead of the tabs which represented search collections.
• Configurability of search:
  • The introduction of Search Services provides more freedom in configuring the overall search environment.
  • You can now configure multiple remote search setups. Multiple remote search services can be accessed through both the Manage Search administration portlet and the Search Center end user portlet.
• Virtual portal: The following Portal Search resources will be available for each individual virtual portal: Default configured search services, collections, and scopes.
• IBM Lotus Web Content Management™: Search by portal users on IBM Lotus Web Content Management documents provides better security now. These documents are secured by Portal Access Control, and therefore Portal Search filters them according to the access permissions of the user who is searching them.

Changed structure and sequence of administrator and end user tasks and steps

• Portal Search administrator scenarios:
  1. An administrator can create one or more new search services. This step is optional, depending on the requirements; the administrator can also use the default search service.
  2. The administrator configures Portal Search by configuring one or more search services. This is no longer done by configuring the administration portlet Manage Search and therefore not restricted to a single search service.
  3. An administrator creates and configures a new search collection and its content sources.
  4. An administrator defines a scope.
  An administrator can define multiple search services if required by the portal environment. When creating a search collection, the administrator selects the search service that will be used for that collection. A search collection is only available for the search service for which it was created. All search collections are bundled and available by the Search Center portlet.
• Portal Search end user scenarios:
  1. A user performs an initial search. Portal Search applies this search to All Sources.
  2. The user reviews the search result list.
  3. As the list has too many results, the user decides to narrow the search by making it more specific. To do this, the user selects a search scope from the pull-down menu.
  4. Portal Search applies the user search to that scope only and displays a shorter result list.
  5. The user clicks on a search result to view that resulting content.