Portal, Express Beta Version 6.1 Operating systems: i5/OS, Linux,Windows

Portal Search key features and capabilities

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.

• Summarizer
  
• Language support for Portal Search