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Hello, my community has set up federated search with our Zendesk knowledge base. Does the searching functionality described in this post generally apply to external resources as well?

Obviously, Zendesk articles don’t have all of the attributes listed here (replies, tags, answers, etc.). Does that leave us with keyword matches in the title, followed by keyword matches in the content? 

 

If there’s any other documentation on this (which I couldn’t find in my own search), I’d love to know!

Hi ​@mbuuck1 ,

Given that I don’t have an instance to play with myself, it’s a little tricky for me to say for sure but I did find something that might help a bit: https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/4408830243482-About-help-center-federated-search and I did manage to find a couple of communities that are using it, so I fiddled about with those.

It seems that Federated Search basically pings a request to the Zendesk API and lets ZD do most of the work, while the Search tool itself on this side basically just displays whatever comes back from Zendesk as-is. As far as I can tell, the behaviour seems to be controlled by ZD as the search results seemed to be identical to what ZD itself was returning using its native search.

Based on the Zendesk Docs, it certainly seems that way! So I don’t think there’s much Gainsight can do to customise/optimize things because it’s ultimately not in control of how external search tools work.


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