The CC search engine allows your community members to search through all relevant content in your community. With the out of the box federated search integrations you can also easily push external content into the CC search engine.
We are seeing companies building their own unified search experience across various customer channels (community, academy, documentation) with their own (third-party) search platform. These companies want to use their own search solution in the CC instead of using CC default search engine.
This article provides a high level description on what steps need to be taken to disable CC’s default search engine and how to embed your own search platform.
How to embed your own search platform on CC
Embedding your own search platform in CC requires technical work. We highly recommend you to get assistance from your developer resources if you are looking into this!
If you want to bring your own search you will need to do two things:
- Disable CC’s default search
- Embed your own (third-party) search functionality in the CC using a custom header
Disable CC’s default search
Throughout the CC you will find search actions (in the hero banners and in the main navigation). You will need to disable/hide these search actions using Custom CSS.
Embed your own (third-party) search functionality in the CC platform using a custom header
After you have disabled the CC search actions you will need to embed your own search bar into the platform. We recommend you to create your own custom header and within this header include your own search bar. You can either add your own custom header to the CC by directly inserting your own HTML/CSS or by inserting an SSI file.
Limitations
- Community members will be taken away from the community when they search in your own search functionality because your search result pages will live outside of the CC.
- Community members can’t find hidden/gated content because external search solutions can’t know wether a user has permissions to view certain content or not.
