Administrators can control the search collection process. They can
thereby enhance the user's search experience. The following list gives a brief
description of all available key features of Portal Search, including the
new ones for this portal version and the ones from previous portal versions:
- Advanced search capabilities in the Search Center
- The Search Center portlet provides advanced search features now. You can
now refine your search by specifying the title, the owner, and other document
properties. For details refer to the Search Center portlet help.
- Refine your search by using facets
- You can now refine your search by using facets. Available facets can include
the file type, the component, and a Last Modified facet with several time
spans to use. For details refer to the Search Center portlet help.
- Use one or multiple search services
- You can use the search services that are provided with portal, or you
can add one or more search services to Portal Search. For example, this is
required in scenarios where you set up remote search or your portal is set
up in a cluster. When you create a search collection, you select the search
service under which it works.
- Use search scopes for users to focus their searches
- You can define search scopes to limit search results to specific content
location. This enables users to target their searches better. Users can select
these scopes from a selection menu provided with the search box in the theme
and with the Search Center portlet.
- Add 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 from a selection menu
provided with the search box in the theme and with the Search Center portlet.
- Create search collections
- You can define one or more search collections for a search service. You
can give a specific set of users access to a search collection by using portal
access control.
- Crawl multiple Web sites, portal sites, and sub-domains
- As an administrator you can specify one or more starting points per search
collection. This allows you to collect information either from multiple Web
sites or from distinct sub-domains within an Intranet. This includes Web sites,
local document collections, the public pages of other portals, and your own
portal (this includes the secured pages of your portal based on Portal Access
Control). You can combine different types of content sources into one search
collection.
- Internet style search capabilities
- You can search for free text and use internet style plus ( + )
and minus ( - ) symbols. You can explicitly search for phrases by
enclosing keywords in double-quotes ( " ). You can also specify a
trailing asterisk ( * ) as a wild card character in keywords.
Note: If
such a masked keyword results in more than 50 words, the list is truncated.
- Browse documents
- You can browse a collection in addition to searching for information.
- Summarizer
- Portal Search provides a summarizer. For more information refer to Summarizer.
- Language Support
- For more information refer to Language support for Portal Search.
- Enriched result page view
- The search results page has been improved. It now includes additional
document specific information such as a summary, the original URL, the dates
when the listed documents were created and modified, as well as author and
description for the document if such attributes exist in the collected document.
Users can toggle between Show Details and Hide
Details views.
- Apply filter rules for the crawler to determine what pages are to be fetched
and indexed:
- As an administrator you can use these to control the type of information
that is retrieved from content sources. Documents or pages that are retrieved
have to comply to a set of given rules in order to be inserted into the collection
and made available for search via the search portlets. For details about filter
rules and how to set them refer to Applying filter rules.
- Monitoring of the crawling process
- Administrators can now view up-to-date information about the status of
each crawl process. This includes:
- Whether the crawl process is currently running
- How long the crawl process has been running
- How many documents have been collected.
- Approval of documents before they are inserted into the collection
- You can use this function to selectively approve which crawled documents
you want to include in the collection. If this option is selected when defining
the collection, documents are stored in a list of pending search collection
items until they are approved.
- Editing document metadata
- Administrators can edit the metadata associated with a document including
the title, author, description, and date.
- Crawling content sources:
- Configure periodic crawls of content sources
- Administrators can choose to automatically refresh an index by scheduling
automatic crawls, for example, "every night at 2 am".
- Start and stop crawls manually
- If required, administrators can manually stop an index build or refresh.
They can also manually start an index update process.
- Monitor the search collection process
- Administrators can monitor the crawling process by viewing the status
of the content sources.
- National language support
- You can select the language for which a search collection is optimized.
The default is English. This feature increases the quality of search results:
it allows users to search for the keyword as entered, including grammatical
variants, such as plurals and inflections. This feature supports all national
languages that the portal supports.
- Specifying a proxy or socks server for external content sources
- If you want to have external content sources crawled, you can specify
proxy and socks servers with the port number in the Manage Search portlet.
- Specification of socks and proxy server with the port number for indexing
external content sources in the portlet.
- Other portal components with a search feature
- With portal you can also use IBM® Lotus Web Content Management™ and Portal Personalization to create and manage content
for your portal or Web site. You use these applications separately, or together
as an integrated content solution for your portal or Web site. These components
are based on JCR and have their own search feature. For
details refer to Managing content.
Portal, Express Beta Version 6.1
