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We’ve been using the Federated Search API since it was in beta 3 years ago and it’s been one of my favorite Gainsight CC features ever since. 

Content from other systems that we index with Federated Search: 

  • LMS
    • Courses
    • Lessons within Courses
  • Documentation
  • API Documentation
  • Our Marketplace of Templates, Snippets, and Accelerators

Maintenance Tips

For content that changes frequently -- ex. Documentation articles added/removed/consolidated/restructured -- you need ways to keep your search content up-to-date. If not, the search results may be incomplete and/or full of broken links. 

Here’s how we do it

We use Zapier, but the concepts could be applied to other automation tools.

  1. Trigger Sheets in Google Sheets
    1. New rows trigger the automation
    2. Prefilled dropdown options for types of updates
      1. New article / New URL to index
      2. Deprecated article / URL (remove the link so as to avoid broken links)
      3. Updated Meta description of the article
    3. When the team publishes changes to documentation, they fill out these sheets, providing the details needed for the API calls via a simple copy/paste
      1. URL
      2. Title of Article
      3. Description of Article
  2. Run Relevant API call based on the type of update
    1. Index Content*
      1. New content
      2. Updated meta description (sending for the same URL overwrites the existing info previously indexed)
    2. Delete Content*
  3. Slack Alerts to a channel & audit results
    1. Alert to a specific slack channel
    2. Contains a pre-defined URL to search the content title in the community, also provides the meta description and URL it should link to
      1. Click the link to see the search in the community
      2. Ensure everything looks right, add an emoji to let the team know it’s been reviewed
      3. If unsuccessful, we troubleshoot and run again

*US region API links

My technical writing team finds this very easy to use and it’s been working for us for well over a year. 

 

 

​@ahamburg9 check this out if you go forward with Federated Search

​@DannyPancratz, this is 🔥

Thanks for sharing ​@DannyPancratz 🙌

This is incredible ​@DannyPancratz  - thanks for sharing it with us!

Thanks for sharing  ​@DannyPancratz ⭐️

​@DannyPancratz

Thanks for the assist! Works like a charm!

How often does your Zaps run in week? Just trying to gauge on recipe usage.

 

We have Workato and now I am considering doing the same.

 

Thanks,

Anthony 

​@ahamburg9 Our writing team works in two week sprints and we only run the automation when we have content to add/remove or if the title/description changes. (Ex. if they just update an article’s content and everything else stays the same, we don’t need to run it)

I’d estimate we average indexing/updating 10 pieces of content every two weeks, so usage is pretty minimal. 

Thanks!

I wrote a Google App Script to evaluate a google sheet to provide the title, content, url, source info into a Json format. The google sheet is set up into three columns “title”, “content”, “url” and the code has the constant of “source”. Happy to give an assist if there are any other google app scriptors out there!

i.e.
https://api2-us-west-2.insided.com/docs/search/#tag/Federated-Search/operation/index
API endpoint: https://api2-us-west-2.insided.com/external-content/index
 

{
"batch": n
{
"title": "string",
"content": "string",
"url": "string",
"source": "string"
}
]
}

Have a great day y’all!

Anthony

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