Help center federated search lets your end users see content in your help center search results that is external to your help center. This means that when an end user searches in your help center, the search results are not just limited to your help center articles or community posts. Federated search can extend its search to, for example: external knowledge bases, learning management software, blogs, and pages of your website. Your end users can also filter their search by type (for example by blog posts).
You can use either of the following methods to implement federated search in your help center:
- Search crawler - The search crawler lets you implement federated search in your help center without developer resources. You can set up multiple crawlers in your help center search settings to crawl and index different content in the same or different websites.
- Federated Search API - REST API that lets you ingest records of your external content into the Zendesk search indexes. This method requires that your developers build and maintain a middleware layer to integrate the site that hosts the external content with the help center.
You can use the API and the crawler simultaneously. However, if you delete a source or a type via the API, then any crawler that is creating or updating records for the deleted source or type will stop working.
This article covers the following topics:
About the search crawler method
You can set up one or more search crawlers to crawl and index external content in the same or different websites that you want to make available to users searching in your help center. External sites that you want to crawl must have a sitemap that lists the pages for the search crawler. In addition, the pages you want to crawl must be public (non-authenticated). If you want to add authenticated content to help center search, you must use the Federated Search API.
When they are configured, crawlers run once every 12 to 24 hours, visiting the pages in the sitemap you specified during setup and ingesting content from those sources into the help center search indexes. Search crawlers index content that is in the page source on the initial page load, even if it's hidden by a UI element, such as an accordion. However, since crawlers do not run JavaScript, they do not crawl content that is rendered by JavaScript or other content that is dynamically rendered after the initial page load. Crawlers also don't crawl links on the pages they visit; they only visit the pages in the sitemap that they are configured to use.
When users perform a search in your help center, relevant external content discovered by the crawler is ranked and presented on the search results page, where users can filter the results and click the links to view the external content link in another browser tab.
To set up the search crawler for federated search, see Setting up the search crawler.
About the Federated Search API method
Zendesk provides a REST API that lets your developers build custom integrations to ingest external content records into your help center search indexes. To ingest external content for search, developers must integrate the application hosting your external content with the external content API.
Once configured, the API ingests external content records and adds them to the help center search indexes. Indexed records can then be made available to the help center search engine when responding to user search queries.
For more information, see Setting up the Zendesk Federated Search API.
External content sources and types
Regardless of the setup method you use, each content record ingested by federated search is associated with a content source and a content type, which are used to filter search results by your end user. See Edit search filters.
You can define sources and types either using the Federated Search API or when setting up the search crawler in Guide. If you define sources and types using the API, they will be available for selection during the search crawler setup. Similarly, if you create a content source and type when you set up the search crawler, they will be reflected in the external_content_type and external_content_source API. See Zendesk Federated Search API Reference.
You can configure your search results to include or exclude external content sources. When external content is included in a help center search, search filters group content by source and type names, making it easier for users to find the information they are looking for. “Source” groups content by point of origin (for example blog) and “Type” groups content by the kind of content it is (for example developer documentation).
Consider useful groupings and names for your external content sources and types when creating them, as that will help your end users easily filter and locate the content that they are searching for in your help center. See Edit search filters.
Considerations for federated search
The following are considerations for using federated search:
- External content search results can appear in help center searches, the knowledge section of the context panel, and in Unified Search API responses. They do not appear in other Guide search-powered interfaces such as Instant Search or the Article Search API.
- The search crawler does not work with websites that use gzip file compression encoding. You will not see search results from these sites.
- A crawl-delay will not be respected by the search crawler when set on external site robots.txt records.
42 comments
Kelsey Davis
Hi, if I use Copenhagen but the theme has been duplicated and then customised, will we still need to edit the theme ourselves or will it be updated as the Copenhagen themes are to be updated by Zendesk? Thanks
1
Maggie Ungerboeck
Hi Kelsey,
Once you customize the theme, then you don't get the automatic theme updates from Zendesk.
Thanks,
Maggie
0
Amanda Quarman
Hi,
I'm very excited about this new feature but under Help Center settings, there is no category 'Search Settings' where I can configure the Federated Search.
Is anyone else not seeing this option in their Help Center settings?
Thanks, Amanda
1
Augusto Silva
Hey @...
This feature is currently only available for Guide/Suite Enterprise customers. Check you Guide subscription to see if it is available.
0
Tray Cushing
Augusto,
According to Ray at Zendesk, in addition to having the Guide/Suite Enterprise edition, you must also have the Support Enterprise edition, correct?
1
Augusto Silva
Hey @...,
Just checked with the team and you don't need Support Enterprise for this specific feature.
You do need Support Enterprise to Enable search across multiple help centers
Hope this clarifies it 🙂
0
Tray Cushing
Wanted to see if anyone could share a sample scripting for an external content record via REST API - thanks.
1
Anton M.
I wonder if federated search results will be accessible by AnswerBot and in Agent Workspace?
4
Gorka Cardona-Lauridsen
Hi @... both of those features are on our roadmap and expected to be delivered in 2021. Making federated search results available in Agent Workspace is the first of the two to be delivered.
1
Jon Simone
Is there a specific reason why articles need to be added through API or am I missing something? Also happy to hear that there are plans for these to be accessible by AnswerBot and Agent Workspace!
0
Gorka Cardona-Lauridsen
Hi @..., we have chosen to expose an API to ingest external content records as the first interface because it allows for full flexibility to integrate with any other service that hosts the content you want to make discoverable through Help Center search, but we are currently working on adding no-code methods for adding external records as well. Unfortunately I can't give an ETA yet.
1
Darren Stagnaro
One thing we are noticing is that article filtering based upon title and URL is not unique enough. While we are using the description field, it would be good if federated search also supported the attribute to pull in tags (similar to how it works with Guide articles) to be able to present better search results.
0
Laura Mirto
Hi,
I'm looking for the best method to ingest content from an external website. I've tried testing the curl method for creating an external content record, but I am getting errors. Each property gets this message "curl: (6) Could not resolve host:".
I have successfully added my content source and types.
Also, does anyone have a suggestion on a quick way to create records for each page of an external website?
Thanks, Laura
0
Eric Nelson
Hey @..., can you send us the curl request that you're trying so we can take a look?
Thanks!
Eric
0
Laura Mirto
Hi Eric,
Sure, I did end up opening a ticket for this issue as well.
So I tried two methods. The first was creating a text file with the JSON data and then used the following curl request in my Command Prompt. I've edited out a few things for sharing.
Where the CreateContent.txt file included the following.
The second method I tried was just using a curl request.
Please let me know if you need anything else.
Thank you,
Laura
0
Laura Mirto
I was able to resolve my create content records issue by using the Postman application instead.
Here is a great article for anyone else who is new to APIs with Zendesk.
https://developer.zendesk.com/documentation/developer-tools/working-with-the-zendesk-apis/exploring-zendesk-apis-with-postman/
1
Kaela Chandrasekaran
I would like to be able to set the base URL for my sources. For example, if my blog is at www.[domain].com/blog I want the source link to go there. Currently, it looks like the link is autogenerated to www.[domain].com URL. I can change this via customization in the theme but it would be nice to have that as part of the create source API. Is that something you may support in the future?
0
GS Admin
we are using zendesk suite enterprise version .but the search is not visible to me in our settings menu.
could you please help.
1
Phoebe Morin
Hi Gaurav,
You need to add External Content via API first. As soon as you add one External content Record (which will require at least one Type and Source), the option should be enabled for you.
To create external content, please visit the following resources:
I hope this helps! Let me know if you have any further questions.
-1
Jay Parafina
Hi Gorka Cardona-Lauridsen,
in a previous post you stated:
Is Federated search live for the Agent Workspace today (Specifically in 'Knowledge Capture')? If not, do we know then the live date is?
We have 'suggested articles' live on our Support Ticket Submission flow (as a means for ticket deflection) -- if we implement Federated Search, will external articles generate in the those results?
Thanks in advance!
0
WhatsApp Connector
Hello Gorka Cardona-Lauridsen and rest of the Product Management team,
Please let me know if federated search is now available for the articles/content that Answer Bot recommends. Curious also about the availability of that functionality for the Agent Workspace search as well.
Thanks.
1
Gorka Cardona-Lauridsen
Hi WhatsApp Connector, great question!
Unfortunately Federated search is not yet available in Answer Bot answers, but we intend to make it available to Answer Bot as well. I can't currently give an ETA though.
The good news on the other hand is that Federated search (external content) is available in the Knowledge tab in the Agent Workspace. See:
0
Jay Rohrer
If we are using external articles, how do we add labels so that Answer Bot will pick them up?
Thanks.
0
Brett Bowser
I double checked on my end and it doesn't look like this is possible to link up Answerbot with your external articles. The Answerbot API can only work with Help Center content in Guide.
Let me know if you have any other questions!
1
Steve Steffel
Hello! Will external content show up in the customer side of the ticket request form? That would be massively helpful for us (as well as appearing in the agent workspace, which it looks like it will). Thank you!
0
Jupete Manitas
This Federated Search in your Help Center is limited to the search functionality at the moment. But this could be a great feature while making a request in the ticket request form. We encourage you to post this in our guide product feedback for our product team's reference. Lastly, you can consult our professional services team as they can make custom apps outside the native feature. Thank you!
0
Paul Moran
Hi, it would be great to associate the external content with existing zd categories so that when you do a search 'By Category' the external content will show up in under that category's search results.
I can try to fudge it by using the associated external record's 'Type' or 'Source'. i.e. create a 'Type' record with the same name as the category i.e. a 'Widget A' category would have a 'Widget A' 'type' record. Not a great solution though.
0
Kel S.
Is it possible to include Vimeo videos in the search results, so you could return videos hosted externally instead of having to embed them into articles?
0
Walter
Hi Kel S.,
Yes, it is possible. You just need to have an appropriate description in the Federated Search index for each video.
1
Chad Susa (Gravity CX - Zendesk Partner)
Hi All
I'm guessing that external knowledge (federated search) is still not available for AnswerBot or Flowbuilder?
Just wondering if this is still on the roadmap? No stress on ETA, just want to know if it's being pursued.
Cheers :)
1