Can you replace inSided's search with a third-party search provider? (Coveo)

Hey Adam!

I’m afraid not based on my understanding of the platform. Well, OK… Tom Shaddock may have revealed a few clues to me a while ago…

The design of the inSided platform means that Algolia is very, very tightly integrated and cannot be replaced or overridden with anything else. I would imagine that trying to inject your own search tool via third party scripts will not end well, especially because the Algolia search has access to areas of the platform that third party scripts will probably never have access to.

Something like this would probably work better as an officially supported integration, but I don’t think inSided would be able to easily change the built-in search provider anytime soon.

Thanks as always for the perspective @Blastoise186!

Hehehe, you definitely have a good idea here though, so I hope you don’t mind if I let you take the credit. :)

Personally, I’d probably argue the best way to implement this would be via new Federated Search integrations. There’s probably a ton of potential too, but it’d be a case of figuring out which ones are worth doing. On the plus side, that’s not my problem to figure out! 

Hi @adam.ballhaussen 

I know exactly what you are thinking. As an Alumnus from Coveo, I moved from Coveo to inSided 3 months ago, I know very well the thought and Idea you have. 

As you are probably aware, Coveo being JSUI component you can pretty easily add the Coveo search component in the custom header. That is no issue. The problem would be where and how to present the results and maintain a uniform community based experience.

What other sources would you like to add to your community search?

Hey @Alistair FIeld. Right now the only source we’re looking to add to our community search (in addition to Zendesk) is Docebo. We’d like to surface our courses and assets from Docebo University via search in inSided. We know we can do it via inSided’s federated search and are exploring doing so later this year, but we’d ideally like to use the same search (Coveo) across all of our platforms.

Hey,

Wanted to share some ideas on this question. It’s not a matter of ripping and replacing the inSided search with Coveo in our platform but there are ways to bring in your own search. I’ve wrote this small article to shed some light on this: 

• Embed your own search platform in CC Search

The idea is that you hide the inSided search actions and add your own custom header that has the Coveo search box. This would require custom development work to make this happen. Gooddata (https://community.gooddata.com/) is a good example who included their own search box across several customer channels. 

Thank you @Yoeri! Nice to see you around here again, btw It’s been too long!

Yeah, shifted roles at inSided but I’m still around  Keeping an eye on inSpired here and there