Google Search Appliance User Experience Guide - Manual (Page 17)

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Chapter 5 Public versus Secure Search User Experience
Overview
The search experience can vary greatly depending on how the search results are being served.
Understanding differences between viewing public search results versus viewing secure search results is
essential for planning your search experience. There are certain limitations to the features that can be
used when performing secure search, and the user experience is different in several key ways which are
described in this chapter.
In addition to public content that is available to everyone, the search appliance can crawl and index
documents that require a login and password or another form of authentication. To protect confidentiality
at serving time, the search appliance determines whether the user performing the search is authorized to
view each document before it displays results.
The access query parameter specifies whether to search public content, secure content, or both.
Public search
What is a public search? A public search, in the context of the GSA, is a search performed by a user
without the need for authentication or authorization over content indexed by the GSA and marked as
public in the GSA’s index. This can occur on a publicly accessible website or behind the firewall over
internal content that has been marked as public on the GSA.
Parameter Value Description
access p Search only public content
The following example shows a search request with access=p.
http://GSA_HOSTNAME/search?q=google&site=default_collection&btnG=Google+Searc
h&access=p&client=default_frontend&output=xml_no_dtd&proxystylesheet=default_
frontend&sort=date%3AD%3AL%3Ad1&entsp=a__gsa_doco_policy&oe=UTF-8&ie=UTF-
8&ud=1&exclude_apps=1
Secure search
What is a secure search? A secure search is a search in which a user is authenticated and the GSA only
returns results that the user is authorized to see. This process can be silent or the user may be prompted
for credentials. The search appliance also needs credentials to crawl the secure content and marks the
data as secure in the index.