Enable anonymous users to search public pages of the portal

We can enable anonymous users (sometimes also called unauthenticated users) to search public pages of the portal using the portal Search Center portlet. Search by anonymous users works only on public pages of the portal, as the users are not logged in to the portal.

To enable anonymous users to search public pages of the portal, we need to complete the following tasks:

• Make the Search Center portlet available on a public page of the portal so that users can access it without having to log in to the portal.

• Enable public sessions for the portal. The reason is the Search Center portlet needs a valid session for its run time, and by default, sessions are not enabled on anonymous pages in the portal. By default, sessions are only created when a user authenticates and logs in to the portal.

• Have or create our own custom search scope. We can edit our own custom scopes, but we cannot modify the default search scopes to give anonymous users access.

1. Place the Search Center portlet on a public page. See the following subtopic.

2. Give the Anonymous Portal User group access permission to the Search portlet that you make available to anonymous users, and to the page on which that portlet is. To give access permission, use the User and Group Permissions portlet, the Resource Permissions portlet, or the Manage Portlets and Manage Pages portlets.

3. Give the Anonymous Portal User group access to the Search collections. To complete this step, use the User and Group Permissions portlet or the Resource Permissions portlet. From the list of Resource Types, select PSE Sources, then select the required search collections that you make available to public users, and assign the Anonymous Portal User access to those search collections.

4. Optional: Create a custom search scope, if you did not create one before already. See Manage and administer Portal Search, section Creating a new search scope.

5. Give the Anonymous Portal User group access to the Search scope:

   1. Click the Administration menu icon in the toolbar to open the administration menu.

   2. Click Search Administration > Manage Search > Search Scopes

   3. Locate the scope that we want the anonymous user to use and click Edit Search Scope.

   4. Click Yes to enable the option Visible to Anonymous Users.

6. Enable public sessions by setting the parameter public.session to true in the portal Navigator Service in the WAS console. For details about the portal Navigator Service and about how to set portal service configuration parameters see the respective topics.

7. Restart both WAS and portal for the changes to take effect.

• Placing the Search Center on a public portal page
  We can place the Search Center portlet on a public page of the portal, and have the search box in the portal theme take users who do a search to that public Search Center.

Previous topic: Configure the portal site for search by internet search engines

Next topic: Configure the custom portal themes to include the search box

Related tasks:

Set service configuration properties

Related reference:

Navigator Service

Related information

Manage Search