# Searching an external site possible?
**URL:** https://meta.discourse.org/t/searching-an-external-site-possible/98592
**Category:** Feature
**Tags:** search
**Created:** [October 3, 2018, 2:25am UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/searching-an-external-site-possible/98592 "2018-10-03T02:25:38Z")
**Posts on this page:** 7
**Page:** 1
### Author:  [@emilio](https://meta.discourse.org/u/emilio)
#### Post date: [October 3, 2018, 2:25am UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/searching-an-external-site-possible/98592/1 "2018-10-03T02:25:38Z")
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.
Thanks 🙂
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### Author:  [@Stephen](https://meta.discourse.org/u/Stephen)
#### Post date: [October 3, 2018, 4:28am UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/searching-an-external-site-possible/98592/3 "2018-10-03T04:28:43Z")
Why not move your support pages to a category on Discourse? It’s quiet a common approach to this scenario.
The category could be read-only to normal users and would afford all the benefits you’ve outlined above.
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### Author:  [@pfaffman](https://meta.discourse.org/u/pfaffman)
#### Post date: [October 3, 2018, 11:28am UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/searching-an-external-site-possible/98592/8 "2018-10-03T11:28:24Z")
> [@Suggestion - link to existing content faster from the url button](https://meta.discourse.org/t/suggestion-link-to-existing-content-faster-from-the-url-button/98482/7):
>
> I know you are joking but that is actually possible with a plugin, and @vinothkannans created just that for a customer exploding_head. Basically on search you hit an external service, and merge the results in the search results.
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### Author:  [@emilio](https://meta.discourse.org/u/emilio)
#### Post date: [October 4, 2018, 3:18am UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/searching-an-external-site-possible/98592/9 "2018-10-04T03:18:42Z")
> [@Stephen](#):
>
> Why not move your support pages to a category on Discourse?
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.
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### Author:  [@ravilach](https://meta.discourse.org/u/ravilach)
#### Post date: [April 29, 2020, 9:37pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/searching-an-external-site-possible/98592/10 "2020-04-29T21:37:14Z")
Curious of level of effort that was to do. We are looking for around the same to hit our KnowledgeBase as part of the Search.
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### Author:  [@sicco](https://meta.discourse.org/u/sicco)
#### Post date: [May 20, 2025, 2:58pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/searching-an-external-site-possible/98592/11 "2025-05-20T14:58:13Z")
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:
- [Federated Search](https://meta.discourse.org/t/federated-search/142514)
- [How do I federate search results beyond the forum?](https://meta.discourse.org/t/how-do-i-federate-search-results-beyond-the-forum/203218)
- [Search extension to combine WordPress and Discourse search results](https://meta.discourse.org/t/search-extension-to-combine-wordpress-and-discourse-search-results/64448)
- [Can you pull non-Discourse results into Discourse search](https://meta.discourse.org/t/can-you-pull-non-discourse-results-into-discourse-search/216632)
- [Expanding Search / Similar Topic Externally](https://meta.discourse.org/t/expanding-search-similar-topic-externally/149829)
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### Author:  [@Tris20](https://meta.discourse.org/u/Tris20)
#### Post date: [May 20, 2025, 9:07pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/searching-an-external-site-possible/98592/12 "2025-05-20T21:07:28Z")
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?
`https://meta.discourse.org/search?q=this%20is%20my%20search%20term`
If yes, then this component will work.
There’s a post here where I show how it works:
> [@Discourse has slowly been solving a fatigue I didn't realize I had](https://meta.discourse.org/t/discourse-has-slowly-been-solving-a-fatigue-i-didnt-realize-i-had/308520/4):
>
> This was one of our core problems as well. We have an obscene amount of platforms doing the same thing, and Discourse is phenomenal at gluing all that stuff together when done right. In particular we lacked a single point of search. To achieve this at (very) low cost we sponsored the Discourse team to modify the [header search](https://meta.discourse.org/t/header-search/194093) so it allows us to search other platforms from the Discourse search bar. Now we can search Confluence etc from Discourse slight_smile Note: This doesn’t search nativel…
and a post here where I document a bit more about how to set it up:
> [@Advanced Header Search](https://meta.discourse.org/t/advanced-header-search/194093/70):
>
> Hey @Stephane_Roy, Sorry I didn’t see this earlier. From memory, Penar did most of the work on this, but I wrote the spec so can answer most of your questions about this functionality. Feel free to nudge me here if you have more questions slight_smile Below is an example of what I did inside our Gitlab Category. You can see in our header search bar that as soon as we type a search term(in this case pipeline) you can search the gitlab forum(clicking comments button), the gitlab docs(book), …
If you give this a go and have any questions I’m happy to answer them here 🙂