Federated Search

Hi - has anyone created a federated search experience using their Discourse forum? We use ZenDesk to host our knowledge base article and we’d like the ability for when our customers search in either Discourse OR Zendesk they are provided results for existing forum posts and knowledge articles. Here’s an example of what type of functionality I’d be looking for. inSided - Federated Search App Integration with Zendesk Support

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This is typically a custom enterpise level feature that requires some level of bespoke buildout.

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I haven’t seen a Discourse/Zendesk specific one, but I’d also be very interested in any leads on this.

We also use ZD as the source of truth for our Customer Success team, as it hosts all the official knowledge base articles. Customers often land on forum topics though, as the forums will have closer matches to the types of problem description that customers would use.

Making it easier to get people from forum conversations to official answers would be great. I’ve seen lots of similar search options for other platforms, but haven’t seen one set up to index Discourse and ZD Knowledge Base yet.

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One option here that requires a bit of a change of workflow would be to maintain the KB articles on Discourse and then use Zendesk APIs + webhooks to publish the copies on Zendesk.

Curious have you seen knowledge explorer? https://meta.discourse.org/knowledge-explorer

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I hadn’t seen that - I’ll take a look :slight_smile:

Our various support teams are solidly embedded in ZD at the moment though, so I don’t think they’d be too keen to change that - changing where and how those articles are uploaded would disrupt the workflow of 60-odd people across many different teams.

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You should be able to integrate your multiple Discourse forums with your own Searx self-hosted search.