Federated Search Maintenance Tips

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.