Which part of EnterpriseSearch should I use for search bar on Drupal site?

Elastic Search
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Hello everyone,

I have a completely basic question. I'm not sure which part of elastic makes sense for us. I've been all around the web reading articles and the elastic.co site and I think I'm missing something.

So, we need a search box on our Drupal-based website that will return search results from various sources:

  • Confluence wiki documents (public)
  • Discourse forum
  • the Drupal site itself
  • help tickets, etc

None of these sources will be all that big.

Seems like Elastic Cloud with Elastic Enterprise Search is the way to go for us. But I got a bit confused over the choices in Enterprise Search, which consists of the 3 parts:

  • App Search
  • Workplace Search
  • Site Search (webcrawler)

My questions -
Is it true that Workplace Search is really for a company-internal use? I see the confluence connectors for workplace search, but we wouldn't use WS to hook up to our seach bar on our website, right?

So that makes me think app search is the way to go.
I set up Engines in App Search, but I do not see connectors to Confluence.
So now I'm wondering if we even need "connectors". Can we can just use Site Search to webcrawl the Confluence wiki, and also the sources as well, since the content sources will not be huge.

ON my Elastic cloud trial, I set up an App Search engine and tried crawling. Now once I have this set up in the Elastic Cloud, how do I get that into my Drupal search box?

Thank you VERY MUCH for any insight!

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hi there @tonyfam your best starting point here would be to go with App Search. Site Search is a separate offering on a different platform. App Search can cover your site search use cases with the engine embedded web crawler. For the Confluence wiki may I ask if you're using Confluence Cloud or Confluence Server?

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Thank you. We are using Confluence Cloud.

1 Like
4

Thank you, that's super helpful. One optional path you could do to make sure you can use our connector alongside the power of App Search would be to use the confluence cloud connector package (8.3.0 release notes | Elastic Enterprise Search Documentation [8.3] | Elastic) that we offered in 8.3. That connector outputs to Workplace Search custom source API, but easily could be modified to output to Elasticsearch bulk indexing API if you like. It's open code so you have full flexibility here. Even if you chose to keep it outputting to Workplace Search, there's still an Elasticsearch index that is powering the content source. You can pull that into App Search using this capability. Elasticsearch index engines (technical preview) | Elastic App Search Documentation [8.2] | Elastic Lastly, I highly encourage you to explore Search UI (in particular this guide) Search UI with Workplace Search | Elastic Documentation This will set you up to use App Search's toolkit with the confluence cloud connector and web crawler in one installation.

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We'd be very interested in your feedback so let me know if you would like to chat with the PM team about your challenges.

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Hi Serena, Thank you!
It turns out we are able to use the App Search with the meta engine, with the sub engines doing webcrawls at this time. We using the Search UI on our website.

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