Securing application information in system-wide search engines

Abstract

A system for securing application information in a shared, system-wide search service. Each application can register a security filtering module that is to be used at search time to filter data associated with that application. When a user performs a search, initial, unfiltered search results are obtained based the contents of the shared search index. The unfiltered search results are organized by application, and previously registered filter modules are called to perform user specific, per-application filtering on the initial results. The filter modules cause data to which the user issuing the search request does not have access to be removed from the search results, on a per application basis. Those of the initial search results that are determined in this way to not be accessible to the user issuing the search request are removed, resulting in a set of filtered search results that are presented to the user. The filtered search results thus contain indications only of data that is accessible to the user. In this way, the system-wide search service filters search results to remove indications of data which match the search criteria provided by the user, but to which the user does not have access, based on a conveniently extensible, per-application search result filtering process.