How can Confluence content be added to an external search aggregator?

Question

Hi. I'm interested in using an as-yet undetermined search aggregating tool that would allow customers to do one search against the contents of:

* Our company's Support knowledgebase, which will live customer-accessible Confluence space (server, not hosted), and
* The contents of our product WebHelp, which lives outside of Confluence.

Questions:

* Does Confluence have a search API that the search aggregator can leverage to compile Confluence content hits into the hit set that the aggregator shows the customer?
* Can anyone recommend a search aggregator that will do this aggregation? (Note: I see that there's a plug-in called OpenSearch. Would this enable communication with an aggregator?)

Thanks.

-Kurt Euler

Minerva

Kurt Euler1 · Answer

OK, thanks Alex and Sash. I'll look in to these ideas.

Alex Medved _ConfiForms_ · Answer

I agree with Alex, there are many options to answer your question. Couple of ideas from me:

* Using Confluence REST API for searching - https://docs.atlassian.com/confluence/REST/latest/#d3e1014 (if you are ok with keeping your search index in confluence and having some custom logic with merging search results from different sources)
* Developing a custom extractor, that will notify your external system about content updates/changes - https://developer.atlassian.com/display/CONFDEV/Extractor+Module (if you want to maintain your own search index outside and want to get confluence updates asap)

Alejandro Conde Carrillo · Answer

I see different options here:

* You could have a crawler which goes through the Confluence pages and index them to give you aggregated results.
* There are options to integrate Confluence with SharePoint which include searches. Check SharePoint Connector for more information.
* Confluence uses Lucene as the search engine. You could write a program using Lucene which queries Confluence index files and aggregate the results with your other sources.