Customize the search collection for secured portal pages

Set up our own customized search collection for searching a secured portal site.

1. Plan and determine which portlets and portal pages to be accessed by the crawler and made available for search. This must be the sum of all of the portal resources to be available for search by all users to be able to search those resources.

2. Make a conscious decision about the user ID that we use when we configure crawling and indexing, and which access permissions that user ID requires.

3. To ensure encryption of sensitive data stored, such as the crawler user ID and password, update, and run the file searchsecret.xml using xmlaccess.sh. For details about encryption, see the topic about Encrypting sensitive data.

4. Create a dedicated crawler user with a user ID and password in the portal.

5. Give the crawler user ID the required access permissions to the portal resources as determined by the planning step: Access to all portlets and pages that must be indexed and thus be made available for search by users.

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

7. Click Search Administration > Manage search.

8. Click Search Collections to open the Search collections panel.

9. Create a search collection for the portal site.

10. Create the content source. The root URL for the portal is already completed. Select Portal Site for the type of content source. Complete the user ID and password for the crawler user created. Complete the other fields and select the options as needed.

11. To enable search on the portal site for users, click Start Collecting.

    1. We can crawl, index, and search secured portal pages only on your local portal installation. For security reasons, we cannot crawl secured pages of one portal site from another portal site.

    2. Under normal circumstances, exclude all administrative portlets and all portlets that represent highly dynamic content from being accessible to the crawler user. This includes such portlets containing action links with Delete actions. Otherwise, the Delete action can be started through the crawler.

    3. Instead of creating a new search collection and content source for the portal site search we can also use the collection and content source of the default portal site search setup. In this case, replace the completed user ID and password in the Edit Content Source Configuration panel with the one to use.

    4. For details about how to create a search collection and a content source, see the topics Create search collections and Managing the content sources of a search collection, and the Manage Search portlet help.

Parent Configure search on a secured portal site

Related tasks:

Encrypting sensitive data
Manage the content sources of a search collection

Related reference:

Create search collections
Tips for using Portal Search