Customizing your search collection for secured portal pages

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

If you want to set up your own search collection for searching a secured portal site, proceed by the following steps:

Plan and determine which portlets and portal pages you want to be accessed by the crawler and made available for search. This must be the sum of all of the portal resources that you want to be available for search by all users that you want to be able to search those resources.
Make a conscious decision about the user ID that you use when configuring crawling and indexing, and which access permissions that user ID should have.
To ensure encryption of sensitive data that is stored, such as the crawler user ID and password, update and run the file searchsecret.xml using the XML configuration interface. For details about how to do this, refer to Encrypting sensitive data.
Create a dedicated crawler user with a user ID and password in the portal.
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 should be indexed and thus be made available for search by users.
Click Administration > Search Administration > Manage search.
Click Search Collections. This opens the Search collections panel.
Create a search collection for the portal site.
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 that you created. Complete the other fields and select the options as required.
To enable search on the portal site for users, click Start Collecting.

Note:

You can crawl, index, and search secured portal pages only on your local portal installation. For security reasons, you cannot crawl secured pages of one portal site from another portal site.
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 which contain action links with Delete actions. Otherwise the Delete action can be invoked through the crawler.
Instead of creating a new search collection and content source for the portal site search you can also use the collection and content source of the default portal site search setup. In this case you only need to replace the completed user ID and password in the Edit Content Source Configuration panel with the one that you want to use.
For details about how to create a search collection and a content source refer to Creating and configuring search collections, Managing the content sources of a search collection, and to the Manage Search portlet help.