Integrate an external search service

Flow between the search service and your app

When you need to add a search to your app, an external search service usually fits the bill. After you complete the initial integration with the service and add logic for reacting to content changes, you get a search with an index that’s automatically updated. When integrating an external search service, you need to:

1. Design the index. Ask yourself what data and in what structure you want in the index.
2. Create a service that reacts to content changes and propagates them to the index.
3. Initialize the index with initial data.

1. Design the index

Define what content you want to search for. You might have multiple types of content like articles, products, and more. Think about the search experience you want to build. What do you include in the index? Consider the following guidelines:

• Include the data you want to display in the search results. This avoids fetching content items for each search result.
• If you want a faceted search, include any metadata you want to use for facets. Consider all information that might be relevant, such as taxonomies, languages, collections, and so on.
• If your searchable piece of content is made of multiple linked content items, include the data of the linked items so that your search record is complete.
• Include the identifiers of all content items to be able to update the index when content items change.

To find more about designing a search index, check Algolia's guide about preparing data for a search index.

2. Create a service that reacts to content changes

To ensure the search index stays up to date, you need to react to the content changes made in your Kontent.ai project. You can automate the process of updating your search index by setting up webhooks and responding to notifications:

1. Provide a URL such as https://myapp.com/update-search-index, and get notifications to that URL right after any content changes. 
2. Based on the notifications, decide whether to add new content or remove records from your search index.

Syncing changes in linked items

If there’s a change in a linked content item that isn’t searchable on its own, you first need to check if the item belongs to any searchable content item. To find which search records to update, you need to query your search index for the content item’s identifier. Once you know which records are affected, you can update them with fresh content.

3. Initialize the index

If you already have content items you would like to have in the search index, you will need to insert them into the index before you can use it. It can be similar in functionality to the endpoint that syncs changes, but it needs to go through all items in your Kontent.ai project and sync all of them. You’ll call this endpoint only manually when initializing the index and occasionally when you want to rebuild the index from scratch. For example, when you want to change the data saved in the index for each item.

Examples of external search integration