We use discourse for support questions but many answers can be found in our support documents. (it is wordpress based). Was curious if anyone knew of a way or thoughts on making the Discourse search include results from an external site.
Another thought was to try to get links to related support doc articles to show up in a side bar of a post they are looking at or a search they just did. Similar to the “Your topic is similar to…” when creating a topic but with external site content
Anyway curios if anyone knows of any thing someone may have done like that.
Not sure we are ready to give up on all the customization possibilities available with Wordpress, but I had not considered that. Will need to think on it.
I would also like to be able to extend the Discourse search to include search results from other search engines. I’ve looked into it, but this part of Discourse seems quite undocumented and hard to make a plugin for. I’ve made a proof of concept by directly editing the source code, but that is obviously far from desirable.
Over the years there have been quite a few calls for such a feature:
If you want to integrate the results into Discourse’s search itself, I think you can still use algolia, but that solution requires a lot of effort(e.g. how does one prioritise which results from which sites are shown, and is the right metadata easily available and always up to date?) and is an additional cost(algolia licensing).
A free, low maintenance and effort option, which directs users to external content is the Advanced search bar extension which we commissioned Discourse to extend a few years ago. Basically if the external site is using standard url queries for their search, it is compatible with this option.
By this i mean, do their search urls look like this?
