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.
Table of contents
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
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.
You can also specify what projects you want to search using the
project:{name}syntax, for example: “project:docs project:dev search”. See Search Query Syntax.- Special query syntax for more specific results
We support a full range of search queries. You can see some examples at Special queries.
- Configurable
Tweak search results according to your needs using a configuration file.
- Ready to use
We override the default search engine of your Sphinx project with ours to provide you with all these benefits within your project. We fallback to the built-in search engine from your project if ours doesn’t return any results, just in case we missed something 😄.
- API
Integrate our search as you like. See Server Side Search API.
Search 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.
Search analytics demo¶
Search as you type¶
readthedocs-sphinx-search is a Sphinx extension that integrates your documentation more closely with the search implementation of Read the Docs. It adds a clean and minimal full-page search UI that supports a search as you type feature.
To try this feature, you can press / (forward slash) and start typing or just visit these URLs: