the past couple weeks have been busy… but not with Google. the GSA is basically doing its thing – set it and forget it i guess you could say.

i’ve been trying to get ready for the security + exam that i’ll be taking in two weeks. im just a LITTLE paranoid about bombing the test so ive been studying my arse off.

So basically, a secure search works like this…

Not to state the obvious but to start things off – a user enters a search query.

The appliance determines the relevant URLs and then determines whether the user has access to the content. The appliance then makes an authorization request to the appropriate webserver and stores the authorization data. The appliance caches that info for subsequent searches, making those searches faster.

The appliance will wait a maximum of 5 seconds on the content server to respond to the authorization (HEAD requests), if it gets no response it will move on.

Too many of these timeouts could result in poor results, or no results at all.

If your content is behind a proxy server/reverse proxy, etc. that could potentially slow down the process and cause timeouts.