LDN - Luminis Developer Network

Ben started a post about portal searching - something that is near and dear to me. 

I've created a quick portal search which basically searches channel titles and channel descriptions.  This is quite a manual process because someone must access a custom web application and manually maintain all the descriptions for the channels.  I've written this in ASP, and it acutally sits out on a different server than our portal.  I consider this an on-demand search - in that it'll go run an SQL query over the UP_CHANNEL table, and display channel details in a google-esk format.

I've added :

1. last 20 searches
2. 20 most popular searches
3. channel owner information
4. contact channel owner link
5. how to add this channel instructions
6. channel preview

you can see a screenie of our results - I've expanded 1-5 above so you can see how it is all presented.

I store all terms searched with the number of results in a table so I could - conceptually if I had time - see what people want to find and aren't.  This could feed a new channel creation process.

One thing I started and never completed was a similar / related terms search.  So if you entered tennis, it would show not only tennis related content but any sports related content as well in a separate section of the page.