Server Side Search¶

Read the Docs provides full-text search across all of the pages of all projects, this is powered by Elasticsearch. You can search all projects at https://readthedocs.org/search/, or search only on your project from the Search tab of your project.

We override the default search engine of your project with our search engine to provide you better results within your project. We fallback to the built-in search engine from your project if our search engine doesn’t return any results, just in case we missed something 😄

Search features¶

We offer a number of benefits compared to other documentation hosts:

Search across subprojects: Subprojects allow you to host multiple discrete projects on a single domain. Every subproject hosted on that same domain is included in the search results of the main project.
Search results land on the exact content you were looking for: We index every heading in the document, allowing you to get search results exactly to the content that you are searching for. Try this out by searching for “full-text search”.
Full control over which results should be listed first: Set a custom rank per page, allowing you to deprecate content, and always show relevant content to your users first. See search.ranking.
Search across projects you have access to (Read the Docs for Business): This allows you to search across all the projects you access to in your Dashboard. Don’t remember where you found that document the other day? No problem, you can search across them all.
Special query syntax for more specific results.: We support a full range of search queries. You can see some examples in our Search query syntax guide.
Configurable.: Tweak search results according to your needs using a configuration file.

Analytics¶

Know what your users are looking for in your docs. To see a list of the top queries and an overview from the last month, go to the Admin tab of your project, and then click on Search Analytics.

Fig. 4 Search analytics demo¶

API¶

Search is exposed through our API that’s proxied from the domain where your docs are being served. This is https://docs.readthedocs.io/_/api/v2/search for the docs project, for example.

Warning

This API isn’t stable yet, some small things may change in the future.

GET /_/api/v2/search/¶

Return a list of search results for a project, including results from its Subprojects. Results are divided into sections with highlights of the matching term.

Query Parameters

q – Search query
project – Project slug
version – Version slug

Response JSON Object

type (string) – The type of the result, currently page is the only type.
project (string) – The project slug
version (string) – The version slug
title (string) – The title of the page
domain (string) – Canonical domain of the resulting page
path (string) – Path to the resulting page
highlights (object) – An object containing a list of substrings with matching terms. Note that the text is HTML escaped with the matching terms inside a <span> tag.
blocks (object) –
A list of block objects containing search results from the page. Currently, there are two types of blocks:
- section: A page section with a linkable anchor (id attribute).
- domain: A Sphinx domain with a linkable anchor (id attribute).

Example request:

$ curl "https://docs.readthedocs.io/_/api/v2/search/?project=docs&version=latest&q=server%20side%20search"

import requests
URL = 'https://docs.readthedocs.io/_/api/v2/search/'
params = {
   'q': 'server side search',
   'project': 'docs',
   'version': 'latest',
}
response = requests.get(URL, params=params)
print(response.json())

Example response:

{
    "count": 41,
    "next": "https://docs.readthedocs.io/api/v2/search/?page=2&project=read-the-docs&q=server+side+search&version=latest",
    "previous": null,
    "results": [
        {
            "type": "page",
            "project": "docs",
            "version": "latest",
            "title": "Server Side Search",
            "domain": "https://docs.readthedocs.io",
            "path": "/en/latest/server-side-search.html",
            "highlights": {
                "title": [
                    "<span>Server</span> <span>Side</span> <span>Search</span>"
                ]
            },
            "blocks": [
               {
                  "type": "section",
                  "id": "server-side-search",
                  "title": "Server Side Search",
                  "content": "Read the Docs provides full-text search across all of the pages of all projects, this is powered by Elasticsearch.",
                  "highlights": {
                     "title": [
                        "<span>Server</span> <span>Side</span> <span>Search</span>"
                     ],
                     "content": [
                        "You can <span>search</span> all projects at https:&#x2F;&#x2F;readthedocs.org&#x2F;<span>search</span>&#x2F"
                     ]
                  }
               },
               {
                  "type": "domain",
                  "role": "http:get",
                  "name": "/_/api/v2/search/",
                  "id": "get--_-api-v2-search-",
                  "content": "Retrieve search results for docs",
                  "highlights": {
                     "name": [""],
                     "content": ["Retrieve <span>search</span> results for docs"]
                  }
               }
            ]
        },
    ]
}

Authentication and authorization¶

If you are using private versions, users will only be allowed to search projects they have permissions over. Authentication and authorization is done using the current session, or any of the valid sharing methods.