Third-party search engines

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minicyclist
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Third-party search engines

Post by minicyclist »

Hello,

Has anyone had any success adding third-party search engines to the Flare output? For us the Flare search is too limited as we need to search documents stored externally to the Flare project.

Unfortunately the Google search is causing too many problems (it redirects to google, it causes javascript errors, and often breaks the Flare output).

My main issue with Flare is its resistance to integrate with external systems but if there's a third-party search solution that would be a big help.

Thanks,
Ian
Jbleasdale
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Re: Third-party search engines

Post by Jbleasdale »

Funny this should come up. I have a call with Cludo tomorrow about potentially implementing them in our Flare project. There no reason a third party solution couldn't work, I think a lot of people just don't bother looking into it.

https://www.cludo.com/en/

I was also pointed towards Coveo, but that was too much of an enterprise solution really.
Joe Bleasdale

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NorthEast
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Re: Third-party search engines

Post by NorthEast »

I'm in the same position - I'm currently looking at Swiftype as an alternative search engine.

Looks well featured, and initially easy to set up - although it looks like you have to use its API to get the best out of it.
minicyclist
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Re: Third-party search engines

Post by minicyclist »

Thanks for the info. I've also discovered that Google search won't let you remove ads (for commercial use) and there's a limit to the number of searches per month, which makes it incompatible with our requirements.

Be interested to hear your findings with the third-party searches. Will they integrate with Flare?
Jbleasdale
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Re: Third-party search engines

Post by Jbleasdale »

minicyclist wrote:Thanks for the info. I've also discovered that Google search won't let you remove ads (for commercial use) and there's a limit to the number of searches per month, which makes it incompatible with our requirements.

Be interested to hear your findings with the third-party searches. Will they integrate with Flare?
Yeah, once google removed their paid for accounts - it became very unattractive.

In terms of integrating with Flare, I don't see why not - its all HTML at the end of the day. I haven't had the conversation yet, but I would think its some custom scripts as well as a basic input field like the Madcap one and their site looks at your site and goes from there - a bit like how Google Analytics works.

Ultimately, the Madcap one looks fairly basic but does take into account certain Madcap specific things like the index keywords etc. It's secretive because it compiles from a proxy, but looking at the page source it's basic and I would imagine all the magic happens in the MadCapAll.js script that probably powers it.
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rogersm
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Re: Third-party search engines

Post by rogersm »

Our team would be really interested in implementing a third-party search engine also. There was someone on the forums that was looking into integrating the search engine from this company: https://www.wrensoft.com/zoom/ , but I am not sure how far they got with it.
Dinnit
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Re: Third-party search engines

Post by Dinnit »

That would be me. I haven't forgotten but we're still looking into integrating completely (blown off course by changing roadmaps) but have not yet found any way of integrating other than redirecting the search results to a separate site. The Zoom search application is very customisable.
Ann
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arshabhirai
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Re: Third-party search engines

Post by arshabhirai »

I should have read thread before trying to implement Google's custom search engine. As @minicyclist pointed out, Flare search engine is too limited when it comes to searching documents stored externally. Has anyone successfully implemented Elastic or any other third party search engine?
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