Announcing help center Federated Search

We are very excited to announce help center Federated Search to help you make sure all of your self-service content is available to users right in your help center. You can read more about the feature  and see the below video to get an overview.

Why did we build this feature?

Naturally, a lot of great self service content is found in your help center. For that reason,  your help center search bar is the first place many users go to find the help they are looking for. However, many Zendesk customers also have great self service content in other places like websites, blogs, other knowledge bases, learning management systems, etc.

Therefore we are proud to launch Help Center Federated Search, which will let you surface all that great content hosted outside your Zendesk help center, whenever your users search your help center.

The Help Center Federated Search feature consists of four main parts:

• Federated Search external content API 
• Federated Search settings in help center
• New curlybars helpers for filtering search results in your theme
• Support for Federated Search in the Copenhagen theme

How does it work?

Federated Search gives you the ability to ingest content records to be indexed and ranked by the help center search engine. This is used to generate search results with both help center content and external content in one unified ranking on the search results pages. To ingest external content for search you will need to integrate the application hosting your external content with the external content REST API.

To enable external content in search results you will also need to update your theme to include the right code or update to the latest version of the Copenhagen theme. To update your theme please refer to the cookbook recipe.  We’ve added the {{source_filters}} and {{type_filters}} properties to the Search Results page which should be used instead of the {{help_center_filters}} and {{filters}} properties when using external content.

Once you’ve ingested content via the API, you can control which sources are available to be searched in your help center. If you have multiple help centers you can choose which content sources are available on a help center by help center basis.

Once you’ve enabled sources on a help center, your federated content will start appearing on the search results page, with the ability for users to filter further their search based on source type. When an end user clicks an external content search result they are taken to the URL of that external content record.

When will it be available?

We are starting the rollout on March 16th and expect it to be available to all eligible customers within a couple of days.

We will also be releasing an update of the Copenhagen theme that will support Federated Search. This means that new customers or new installations of the Copenhagen theme will include Federated Search by default. However if you are already using the Copenhagen standard theme, and don’t want to have to configure a new copy, we will have rolled out an update to your theme by April 6th, 2021.

If you are using a custom theme, implement the {{source_filters}} and {{type_filters}} mentioned above in your theme.

Who will it be available to?

Federated search is available for all Guide Enterprise customers and Zendesk Suite Enterprise and Enterprise Plus.