16.1 Understanding Search Options in Oracle Portal

Oracle Portal offers a number of options for adding search engines to your pages. You can add one of the pre-built search portlets (Basic, Advanced, Custom) or the Oracle Secure Enterprise Search Secure portlet. A basic search matches results with search criteria entered into the Search field. An advanced search is a basic search with additional capabilities, such as the ability to limit the search to a specific page group, page, category, and so on.

The Custom Search portlet has a variety of uses. Page designers can create an automatically executed search whose results dynamically populate a search results page, or create custom search forms and custom results pages for a specific customer or user requirement.

For custom searches, you can display search results in the same portlet you used to enter the search criteria, or you can place two Custom Search portlets on two different pages—one for entering search criteria and one for displaying results. This has implications for the set-up values specified for each portlet, see Section 16.3.8, "Defining Separate Portlets for Search Forms and Search Results".

A pre-built Oracle Secure Enterprise Search Secure portlet is also available. This portlet provides crawling and universal search over all Oracle Secure Enterprise Search-supported repositories and this includes the ability to search content in Oracle Portal. To make use of the pre-built portlet, Oracle Portal must be registered as an Oracle Secure Enterprise Search content source, and the Oracle Secure Enterprise Search provider must be registered with Oracle Portal.

Note:

For more information on how to set up Oracle Secure Enterprise Search, see Oracle Secure Enterprise Search Administrator's Guide available from the Oracle Technology Network at:
http://www.oracle.com/technology/documentation/ses.html