Multi-source indexing

Hello, my name is Davila, and today I’m going to show you how you can index parts - or all - of your digital content in just a few minutes, with very little effort.

To start, we’re looking at our search dashboard. Before I begin indexing, I’ll show you a search page I’ve already set up that is currently crawling some content. I also have an FAQ section on my site that I want to index, but it’s not yet appearing in search results.

So, I’m going to show you how to quickly index a website—or specific sections of a website—using the Squiz Search package.

Inside the dashboard, I already have some data sources connected. I’ll add a new one and create a fresh data source. This takes me to the data source creation screen, where you can see the range of content types you can index with Squiz Search—everything from websites and directories to Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube.

For this example, I’ll index some web content and call it “FAQ.”

Once that’s created, the next step is to add the URL you want to crawl, along with any rules for what to include or exclude. I have an FAQ page I want to bring into search results, so I’ll paste the URL here.

You can also exclude sections of the site—for example, I might choose not to include event pages. In addition, you can decide whether to crawl certain file types. By default, some are selected, but I’ll leave them unchecked for now.

Then I’ll start a full update.

As you can see, you can centralise all your discoverable content into one place. In this example, I have multiple data sources feeding into a single search interface. This helps both staff and public users find what they need quickly and efficiently.

The update is now complete, and it shows one document has been indexed from the FAQ page. Let’s check the search results.

After refreshing, we can now see one FAQ appearing. If I had included more URLs, the crawler would continue indexing additional content, but for now it’s just the single FAQ page showing in results.

Next, I’m going to take this a step further and show you how you can customise indexing behaviour.

In this case, the FAQ page actually contains five questions, but I want each FAQ to appear as a separate search result. To do this, you can use extensions or plugins—no developer required. Squiz Search includes over 30 extensions that extend the functionality of your search experience.

I’ll use a “split content” option. This allows us to split an HTML document into multiple indexed items. I’ll select the data source for my FAQs and define where the content should be split.

In this case, the FAQs are structured as an accordion, so I’ll split on the accordion item class.

I’ll save this configuration and update the data source.

Now we can see that instead of one document, we now have five documents being returned from the FAQ content.

Let’s go back and refresh the search results. Now, when I run the query, multiple FAQs appear individually in the results. Each one shows its own title and description.

As you can see, this was very simple to set up. No technical expertise was required—just a bit of documentation, the right plugin, and a few configuration steps.

Everything was done through the admin UI tools, allowing you to manage and customise your search experience without development effort.

With Squiz DXP, you can bring all your content together into a single, searchable experience. To learn more, book a demo and explore how Squiz can help you build a true one-stop shop for your digital content.