Your community’s knowledge: now searchable!

A community’s strength lies not just in its members, but in the shared knowledge circulating within. Knowledge can be one of a community’s greatest assets, but only if members have a way to browse and find what they need.

Introducing Community Search: A new way to find what you need in your community

Community Search is an embeddable tool that members can use to find information they need no matter where it was produced - in Discord, GitHub, Discourse, in documentation, or anywhere else. Community Search is powered by the data in your Orbit workspace and can be embedded on your main site, on your docs, in your product, and on your community pages.

A strong search benefits everyone: members, the community team, and the entire organization behind the community. Community members have quick access to the shared knowledge, driving faster product adoption and higher satisfaction with your brand. Support load drops when members can quickly find answers to their own questions and find other members who can help them. Intelligent search results can also help users and prospects discover relevant features they didn’t know about.

A broken search experience

Until now, the process that product users and community members go through to find answers to their questions is usually fragmented and frustrating. Users need to check many places:

• Discord
• Docs and guides
• Web pages and blog articles
• Third-party content via search engine
• GitHub code, PRs, and issues
• X/Twitter
• Google

Each platform has a different search experience that users may or may not be accustomed to. Community teams have no control over those search experiences. Google makes money by showing links to your competitors when users search for problems with your product ;)

One search box, many places

Community Search gives users and members a unified search experience across many different types and sources of content. Users benefit from a single, user-friendly experience, eliminating the need to navigate away from your company's site to find answers, and community teams can configure their search for the best results.

Try it

Take Community Search for a test drive right here in the blog! Open it by clicking the icon in the bottom right corner or hitting CMD+K and typing something like "Champions Program".

You can also find Orbit’s community search widget in:

• Orbit Docs
• Orbit App
• Orbit Website

Features

See some of the Community Search features in action.

Combined documentation and conversation results

Discover and browse searchable content

Read full conversations in the search results with highlighting

Search results under your control

You are in control of what appears in the search inside of the widget. You can choose the sources and channels that you want to be indexed, and you can easily remove conversations that you don’t want appearing in results. You can also decide what documentation sources you’d like to include.

Last but not least, Community Search uses AI to determine if posts contain spam or harmful content. High-risk content will be automatically identified and hidden. This content will be available for review and can be reinstated if it’s mistakenly identified as spam.

Get your Community Search

Community Search is available now for current Orbit customers. Just let us know you want to try it or if you’re interested seeing a demo, reach out and we’ll be happy to set one up for you.

And, if you want to follow along with the development and provide ideas and feedback, please join the new #community-search Discord channel. Thanks!