Patent ID: 8849848

Claim:
A method for associating a security trimmer with a document, the method comprising: maintaining, at a Web server computer executing an application program, a search index storing one or more document identifiers, each document identifier corresponding to a document stored at a back-end computing system; associating at least one document identifier stored in the search index with one or more security trimmers comprising executable code for invoking an application programming interface exposed by the back-end computing system to determine whether a user has access rights for a document, wherein associating each document identifier stored in the search index with the one or more security trimmers comprises associating a unique security trimmer identifier and configuration information for each of the one or more security trimmers that configure the operation of the one or more security trimmers at execution time, associating each document identifier stored in the search index with one or more crawl rules, and associating each crawl rule with one or more security trimmers; storing security data associated with each document identifier, the security data retrieved from the back-end computing system; receiving a query from a user including one or more search terms; in response to the query, querying the search index to identify one or more documents matching the search terms; and for each document matching the search terms, executing security trimmers associated with a corresponding document identifier to invoke the application programming interface exposed by the back-end computing system and to transmit the security data and a request for access rights to the document to the back-end computing system to determine access rights of the user to view the document.