Search by external search services

We can have external users search the portal site using search services such as Google or Yahoo!

Search on the portal site by external search services works for public portal pages onlythat is, for pages that users can access without a user ID and password.

To make the portal available for search by external search services, register it with the external search service(s) of the choice. Give the URL of the portal to the search service providers so that they can crawl and index the portal site. Depending on how you customize the portal, we might consider indicating the Site Map page rather than the portal home page, or otherwise enhancing the configuration. For details about such scenarios refer to the optional steps in the following section.

Configure the portal site for search by external search services

Optionally, we can configure several additional aspects for search on the portal by external search services:

• By default, the Site Map portlet is available on the portal Welcome page. This way the external crawler crawls only the links of the Site Map portlet. If you change the portal, place the Site Map portlet on the portal home page. Otherwise the crawler can crawl all portal links and might trigger unwanted actions by action links, such as a Delete button. If you do not want the users to be able to see the Site Map portlet, choose one of the following options for placing the Site Map portlet:

  • Place the Site Map portlet in the theme of the portal home page.

  • Place the Site Map portlet on a separate page, and omis that page from the portal navigation.

  The location of the Site Map portlet in the portal determines the URL by which you register to the external search service.

• Configure the Site Map portlet to determine the depth to which the portal can be searched.

• Configure client identification for the external search engines.

• Configure the URL normalization. You do this by setting a property in the portal configuration service named portal WP State Manager Service in the WAS admin console.

For details about how to perform these tasks refer to the following links:

• Configure the Search Sitemap portlet for search by external search engines
  The Search Sitemap portlet generates a navigable list of all public pages of the portal. Configure the Search Sitemap portlet to determine the limit to the number of links that are displayed per page.
• Client identification for search of the portal by external search engines
  For the portal to recognize external search engines, portal provides a client that covers several popular search engines. This client is implemented according to the Composite Capability/Preference Profiles (CC/PP) standard. It has the capability HTML_SEARCH set. To add more search engines, we can configure the client as required.

Parent: Search by external users on the portal site
Related:
Configure the Search Sitemap portlet for search by external search engines
Set service configuration properties
Related reference:
Client identification for search of the portal by external search engines
Related:
Portal configuration services