Skip Headers
Oracle® Secure Enterprise Search Administrator's Guide
10g Release 1 (10.1.6)

Part Number B19002-02
Go to Documentation Home
Home
Go to Book List
Book List
Go to Table of Contents
Contents
Go to Index
Index
Go to Master Index
Master Index
Go to Feedback page
Contact Us

Go to previous page
Previous
Go to next page
Next
View PDF

1 Introduction to Oracle Secure Enterprise Search

This chapter contains the following topics:

Overview of Oracle Secure Enterprise Search

Oracle Secure Enterprise Search (SES) provides uniform search capabilities over multiple repositories.

Oracle SES uses a crawler to collect data from these sources. The crawler supports a number of built-in source types, as well as a published, plug-in architecture for adding new types. Multiple Oracle SES instances may also share content through the federated source type.

Oracle SES supports the following built-in source types:

The following diagram illustrates Oracle SES architecture.

Description of benri006.gif follows
Description of the illustration benri006.gif


See Also:


Oracle Secure Enterprise Search Components

Oracle SES includes the following components:

Oracle Secure Enterprise Search Crawler

The Oracle SES crawler is a Java process activated by a set schedule. When activated, the crawler spawns a configurable number of processor threads that fetch information from various sources and index the documents. This index is used for searching sources.

The crawler maps links and analyzes relationships. Whenever the crawler encounters embedded, non-HTML, or non-textual documents during the crawling, it automatically detects the document type and filters and indexes the document.

Oracle Secure Enterprise Search Administration Tool

Use the Oracle Secure Enterprise Search administration tool to manage and monitor Oracle SES components. For example:

  • Define sources and crawling scope

  • Configure the query application

  • Monitor crawl progress and query performance


See Also:


Oracle Secure Enterprise Search APIs and Applications

Oracle Secure Enterprise Search provides several APIs. For example, the Crawler Plug-in API enables you to create your own secure crawler plug-in to meet your requirements. With the Web Services API, you can customize your search interface.

Oracle SES also provides an out-of-the-box query application.

Oracle Secure Enterprise Search Features

Information in an enterprise can be spread across Web pages, databases, mail servers or other collaboration software, document repositories, file servers, and desktops. Oracle SES searches all your data through the same interface. Oracle SES is fully globalized and works with 27 languages, including Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Arabic, and Hebrew.

This section introduces a few of the features in Oracle SES. It includes the following topics:


See Also:

Chapter 3, "Understanding Crawling and Searching" for more features relating to the crawler

Secure Search

Much of the information within an organization is publicly accessible. Anyone is allowed to view it. Therefore, it is relatively easy for a crawler to find and index that information.

However, there are other sources that are protected. These protected sources may only be viewable by certain users or groups of users. For example, while users can search within their own e-mail folders, they should not be able to search anyone else's e-mail.

For protected sources, the Oracle SES crawler will index documents with the proper access control list. When end users perform a search, only documents that they have privileges to view will be returned.

Federated Search

Oracle Secure Enterprise Search provides the capability of searching multiple Oracle SES applications with their own document repositories and indexes. It provides a unified query framework to search the different document repositories that are crawled, indexed, and maintained separately. Federated search allows a single query to be run across all indexes. It aggregates the search results to show one result list to the user. User credentials are passed along with the query so that each remote application can authenticate the user against its own document repository.

The following diagram illustrates Oracle SES federation architecture.

Description of benri005.gif follows
Description of the illustration benri005.gif

Web Services API

Oracle SES offers a Web services API that lets you build a custom query application very easily.

Extensible Crawler Plug-in Framework

Oracle SES provides an extensible crawler plug-in framework that lets you crawl and index proprietary document repositories.


See Also: