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If you're not finding the answer to your question in the website, this page will help you. If you're still unsure, don't hesitate to send your question to us directly.
How often will you crawl my website?
Every day.
The exact time of day might vary each day, but we'll crawl your website at most every 24 hours. We will also trigger a manual crawling every time your config is updated.
What do I need to install on my side?
Nothing.
The DocSearch crawler is running on our own infra. It will read HTML content from your website and populate an Algolia index with it every day. All you need to do is keep your website online, and we take care of the rest.
How much does it cost?
Nothing.
We know that paying for search infrastructure is a cost not all Open Source projects can afford. That's why we decided to keep DocSearch free for everyone. All we ask in exchange is that you keep the powered by Algolia logo displayed next to the search results.
If this is not possible for you, you're totally free to open your own Algolia account and run DocSearch on your own without this limitation. In that case though, depending on the size of your documentation, you might need a paid account (free accounts can hold as much as 10k records).
What data are you collecting?
The data we save in the index is the data we extract from your website markup, in a custom JSON format instead of HTML. Which part of the page is defined in your custom config.
As the website owner, we also give you access to the Algolia Analytics dashboard, that will let you have more data about the anonymized searches that were done on your website. You'll be able to see the most searched terms, or those with no results.
If you don't have Analytics access, send us an email and we'll enable it.
Where is my data hosted?
All DocSearch data is hosted on Algolia's servers, with replication around the globe. You can find more details about the actual server specs here, and more complete information in our privacy policy.
Can I use DocSearch on non-doc pages?
The free DocSearch we provide will crawl documentation pages. If you want to use it on other parts of your website, you'll need to create your own Algolia account and either:
- Run the DocSearch crawler on your own
- Use one of our other framework integrations or API clients
Can you index code samples?
Yes, but we do not recommend it.
Code samples are a great way for humans to understand how a specific pattern / method should be used. It often requires boilerplate code though, repeated across examples, which will add noise to the results.
What we recommend instead is to exclude the code blocks from the indexing (by
using the selectors_exclude option in your config), and instead structure your
content so the method names are actual headers.
Why do I have duplicate content in my results?
This can happen when you have more than one urls pointing to the same content,
for example with ./docs, ./docs/ and ./docs/index.html or even both http
and https in place.
This can be fixed by stop_urls to all the patterns you want to exclude. The
following example will exclude all urls ending with / or index.html as well
as those starting with http://.
{
"stop_urls": [
"/$",
"/index.html$",
"^http://"
]
}
My favorite project documentation does not use DocSearch. What can I do?
We'd love to help!
If one of your favorite tool documentation is missing
DocSearch, we encourage you to file an issue in their repository explaining how
DocSearch could help. Feel free to ping @docsearch on GitHub in the issue as
well, and we'll provide all the help we can.