Announcing the new Help Center Unified Search API

We’re excited to announce a new Unified Search REST API for Help Center to make programmatic search across multiple content types easier and as the foundation for building more powerful search experiences inside and outside the help center with all types of content, including content not hosted in Zendesk. 

Why did we build it?

Today, Help Center provides two API endpoints for performing search: one for articles and one for community posts.
For many use cases the best search results are needed regardless of content type and with the addition of Federated Search adding external content as a third type of content, there has been an increased need to enable our customers to create search experiences with a mix of content types and to enable programmatic search of external content.

What does it do?

The Help Center Unified Search API endpoint enables you to search and get results across all content types ranked in a unified response.
The endpoint also enables filtering by attributes like locale, placement (categories and sections), brand, external source, type, and more, making it easy to get exactly the content you’re looking for. 

What can you do with it?

You can use this new API with help center templates to fetch content on specific pages or within third party applications.
For example, you could use it to feature certain content on your help center homepage by adding a script to your template that fetches content based on a set of defined search parameters or you could offer a help center search option inside your product, on a corporate website as site search, or within a 3rd party knowledge base, LMS system or similar that allows for code customisation.

Who can use it?

The unified search API is available to all customers with a Help Center. However, community posts are only available to customers on a plan that includes Community and external content is only available to customers on Suite Enterprise or Guide Enterprise.

Tell me more

• Unified Search REST API documentation
• Setting up Zendesk Federated Search in your help center

Limitations

The unified search API has the following known limitations at this point:

• Forward pagination only - The API currently only supports paginating forward in a result set using Cursor Based Pagination. Backwards pagination will be implemented in a future release.
• Result properties - The API currently returns the title, url, result type, and the last update time for each result. We’ll look to expand this to include result snippets and other important information.
• Sorting and filtering by Created and Updated time is not possible but will be implemented in a future release.
• Label filtering is not possible.