Site Wide Search Requirements

by Khy Huang

I. Introduction

This document explains the requirements for the ACS Site Wide Search (SWS) application. It describes both the general purpose for and the feature level specifications of the SWS application. The SWS application provides cross-application ACS searching functionality based upon a variety of user inputs.

II. Vision Statement

Web sites that serve a lot of content must provide a searching tool for their users to find pages with relevent content. Examples of this are e-commerce sites which must help users find products of interest, news providers which must help users find articles pertaining to their interests, and collaborative community sites which must help users find other users's contributions. It is unpleasant to go to a web site to purchase a specific item and end up being forced to browse through product categories instead of simply entering a key word to locate the desired product. These difficulties are especially problematic when the product is categorized in a nonstandard way.

The Site Wide Search (SWS) application provides different methods for a user to locate site content. One such method is to simply enter a key word and return all pages containing this term. A second method allows users to specify the scope of the search. A third method gives users the capability to search for theme related content based on the results of an initial search.

System/Application Overview

IV. User-Cases

V. Related Links

Not available yet

VI.A Requirements: Data Model

Not available yet

VI.B Requirements: User-Level Requirements

30.10 User Search Pages

30.10.10 An embedded search widget which allows users to enter search terms and select site content area.

30.10.20 Advance search page

30.10.20.10 Text Box to enter key words

30.10.20.20 Keywords support the * as wild cards

30.10.20.30 An option to select which content areas to include in search

30.10.20.40 An option to select the type of search. The types are search exact or use boolean operators (and,or,not) between search terms.

30.10.20.50 An option to select date ranges for content

30.10.20.60 An option to select subsite

30.10.20.70 Select the number of rows to display per page

30.10.20.80 Group by context area option

30.10.30 Result Page

30.10.30.10 Display the search results

30.10.30.20 Option to show previous and next results

30.10.30.30 Option to select the number of items to display on each page

30.10.30.40 More like this (next to each result item). Other contents with similar themes.

VI.C Requirements: Admin-Level Requirements

40.10 Admin Pages 40.10.20 None

VI.D Requirements: Developer-Level Requirements

50.10 SWS Application Interface (facility for developers to include application data in the search repository)

50.10.10 Interface for setting up package as one of the content area to search

50.10.20 Interface to add or remove content

50.10.30 API for defining permissions required for viewing the content data

VII. Revision History

Document Revision # Action Taken, Notes When? By Whom?
0.1 Created 2000-11-08 Khy Huang
0.2 First pass editing 2000-11-08 Joshua Finkler
0.2 Added more details 2000-11-09 Khy Huang
0.3 Minor editing 11/10/2000 Joshua Finkler


khy@arsdigita.com