ACCESS RIGHTS IN ENTERPRISE FULL-TEXT SEARCH - Searching Large Intranets Effectively using Virtual Terms

Abstract

One of the toughest problems to solve when deploying an enterprise-wide full-text search system is to handle the access rights of the documents and intranet web pages correctly and effectively. Post-processing the results of general-purpose full-text search engine (filtering out the documents inaccessible to the user who sent the query) can be an expensive operation, especially in large collections of documents. We discuss various approaches to this problem and propose a novel method which employs virtual tokens for encoding the access rights directly into the search index. We then evaluate this approach in an intranet system with several millions of documents and a complex set of access rights and access rules.