Federated Search

The Federated Search functionality is currently in beta. The feature is provided "as is", and the terms and functionality are subject to change in the future (see Terms of Use).

Federated Search allows the ClickHelp search engine to index and search not only documentation inside your portal but also external websites — for example, your company’s marketing site, blog, or another public knowledge base.

This means that a single search query can return results from multiple sources, helping users discover relevant information wherever it lives.

Since AnswerGenius is powered by the same search engine, this feature also enables AnswerGenius to use your external resources when generating answers for readers.

Typical Use Cases

Federated Search can be useful if you want to:

  • Combine results from your ClickHelp documentation and your public website.
  • Let AnswerGenius use both your docs and website content to answer user questions.
  • Provide unified search across several content sources (e.g., main site, blog, developer portal).

Requirements and Limitations

To enable Federated Search for your external resource, the following conditions must be met:

  • Public access
    The pages must be available without authentication. If your site is private, you can still use Federated Search by whitelisting the ClickHelp crawler IP and allowing anonymous access for indexing.
  • Sitemap file
    The site must have a valid sitemap or sitemap index listing the pages to include.
    Example: https://company.com/sitemap.xml. You can provide multiple sitemaps if you want to index several distinct sections (e.g., blog and support site separately).
    Note that by default, our crawler reindexes pages once a week.
  • Static HTML pages only
    The crawler indexes standard HTML pages. It does not support PDF, Word, or other file types, and it cannot fetch content that appears only after scripts run on the page.
  • No API integrations
    Federated Search does not use APIs to access content from systems like Confluence, Zendesk, or Jira. If you need to import such content, refer to our Content Importing and Migration options.
  • No robots.txt / canonical handling
    Federated Search currently does not support robots.txt, canonical links, or other site-level directives used to control how public web search engines crawl or index pages. If you require support for these controls, please let us know.
  • Size limits
    Up to 50,000 pages can be added by default. Larger volumes can be discussed with our team.

Trying Federated Search

If you’d like to evaluate how Federated Search works for your content:

  1. Prepare the sitemap URL(s) of the site you want indexed.
    Example: https://clickhelp.com/sitemap.xml.
  2. Send us the following details for each sitemap:
    1. Sitemap URL. 
    2. A public name for the resource described by the sitemap.
  3. We’ll set up a sandbox portal with Federated Search enabled. 
  4. You’ll receive credentials to access the sandbox and test search or AnswerGenius behavior with your data. 

Feedback

We’d love to hear your feedback about Federated Search! Please contact us if you’d like to try it or discuss specific integration needs.