Portal Express, Version 6.0
Operating systems: i5/OS, Linux, Windows
Portal Search key features and capabilities
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:
- Use one or multiple search services
- 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 the 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
- Search scopes limit search results to specific content locations and specific document types, enabling 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
- 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
- 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
- Administrators can specify one or more starting points per search collection which allows the portal to collect information either from multiple Web sites or from distinct sub-domains within an Intranet.
This includes...
- Web sites
- local document collections
- public pages of other portals
- a portal, including secured pages
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.
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.
- Language Support
- Enriched result page view
- The search results page now includes additional document specific information such as...
- summary
- original URL
- category information
- dates when the listed documents were created and modified
- author and description for the document if such attributes exist
Users can toggle between Show Details and Hide Details views.
- Categorization into a taxonomy
- During the indexing process, incoming documents may be categorized into either a predefined static taxonomy or into a user-defined rule-based taxonomy.
The predefined taxonomy is packaged with a model-based categorizer that categorizes incoming documents.
For a user-defined taxonomy the administrator creates rules that are used by a rules-based categorizer to categorize documents into the user-defined taxonomy.
If the collection is associated with a user-defined taxonomy, you can navigate the category tree to browse and view only documents in the selected category.
If users use the Search and Browse portlet to search a collection with a taxonomy, the Search and Browse portlet lists the category information with the search results. Users can then browse all documents in the same category or limit their search to documents in that category only.
- Apply filter rules for the crawler
- 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.
- 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, date, and categories.
- 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.
- Other portal components with a search feature
- With portal you can also use IBM® Workplace Web Content Management™, Document Manager and Portal Personalization to create and manage content for the portal or Web site. You use these applications separately, or together as an integrated content solution for the portal or Web site. These components are based on JCR and have their own search feature.
Parent topic:
Portal SearchRelated information
Search Center