When an Admin enables External Search, you will be able to add external, public websites to the Global Search. Those pages can be discovered within the Portal Search and viewed with a single click.
In this article:
We strongly recommend that you test this feature in your QA environment before your Production environment to ensure results populate as expected.
Enable External Search
User Options > Admin Center > Search > External Search
1. Click on User Options.
2. Select Admin Center.
3. Click on Search.
4. Navigate to External Search.
5. Toggle on "External search enabled".
If External Search is enabled, a Portal Admin can go to Admin Center > External Search > Search page to configure external sites that they want to be included in the portal’s global search.
6. Select "+ Add Domain".
Add as many domains to be crawled as you would like.
7. Input the Domain Name.
This will be the root url of the website you wish to be crawled for content. This will end with a top level domain name like .com or .edu and will not contain a deeper path like /home or /financial_aid. That information will be added below.
8. Toggle on "Crawl entire domain" (if applicable).
Select this option to look at all pages within the target domain. Be aware that crawling the entire domain is likely to return a lot of results which could make it harder to find items within the portal itself.
9. Enter a Path (if applicable).
A path is only available if Crawl Entire Domain is disabled. This allows the Portal Admin to select certain pages within the URL that should be added to the search results.
10. Select "Add path" (if applicable).
Allows the Portal Admin to add additional pages within the domain listed.
11. Select Add.
When inputting a Path, be sure to format as /URL_Parameter/
12. Select "Initiate Crawl" (if applicable).
Crawls will either be done automatically every week, or, if you are adding a new domain, you can manually trigger the crawl. When manually tiggerring, there might be a delay as the system syncs. The more domains and paths you have, the longer it can take.
Utilize External Search
1. Navigate to Global Search.
2. Type in keywords related to the Domain.
In this example, appropriate keywords would be "metallica", "tour", "events", "concerts", "music", etc.
3. Select the link to be routed to the external site.
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