When working with Notes, you often have it as your primary working platform, but you still need to find things outside that platform. With a cool feature in Notes, Integrated Search Center, you can easily add additional search capabilities to your environment.This feature is a very strong tool that makes it possible to search for almost anything anywhere, inside your Notes/Domino environment and on the web.

Integrated Search Center

To add a search engine to your Integrated Search Center, you can do this by following some simple steps.

First of all, you need to set the Notes client to use the embedded web browser. This is only temporary, while we add the search engine, we will put it back again, as it was. Go to Preferences, click File/Preferences

Preferences web browser

Click OK to confirm changes.

Now we are ready to add the search engine to our Integrated Search Center. As an example i will use LinkedIN group search, to ad LinkedIN as a search engine. Go to www.linkedin.com through the embedded webbrowser and choose groups in the search section.

Group Search Bar

In the Group Search Bar, search for IBM to get all IBM groups in LinkedIN. The reason we do this, is for Notes Client to recognize the url in the embedded web browser as a search engine.

Search in LinkedIN

With the result page open, we will now add this to the Integrated Search Center. Click the Configure a Widget from Current Context….

Configure a Widget

Select Add Search Engine and then click Next to continue.

Add Search Engine

Change the Title for the Search engine, to simply say Search LinkedIN, enable the Show this engine in Search Bar and set the default search parameter, in What did you search for.

Search Engine Preferences

Click Finish to Add the search engine and set the Notes client preferences back to use the default web browser from your operating system.

Now you can click the search bar selector and select Search LinkedIN to test the search engine. You will see that the result uses the settings you made in preferences and give you the search result in the default web browser from the OS. If you prefer to have your search results from searches within the Notes environment to stay within the Notes environment. you can set that up in Search preferences.

Simply click the Search Bar Selector and choose Preferences at the bottom of the drop down. This will give you the Search preferences. Select the Use embedded browser to display Search Center web search result and click OK to accept changes.

Search Preferences

The search results will now be shown in the embedded web browser even though preferences for the web browser in general is set to default web browser from OS.

Introduced: Version 8.5.1