Server side search¶

Read the Docs provides full-text search across all of the pages of all projects, this is powered by Elasticsearch.

Search features¶

Read the Docs has the following search features:

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 have 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. You can also enable or disable the search modal, and toggle the subprojects filter shown inside it, from your project’s Settings, in the left bar, under Search.

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.

Analytics

Know what your users are searching for. See Search analytics

Search as you type¶

Search as-you-type allows users to quickly find exactly what they are looking for while typing. It also saves recent searches, for future reference.

Try it by pressing / (forward slash) and typing.

Configuring search¶

You can configure search options for your project from the dashboard:

Go to the dashboard.
Click on a project name.
Go to Settings.
In the left bar, go to Search.

From there you can toggle Enable search modal, which controls whether the Read the Docs search modal is shown in your documentation, and Show subprojects filter in search modal, which controls whether readers can filter search results by subproject.

How main content is detected¶

Server Side Search indexes the “main content” of HTML pages, ignoring headers, footers, navigation, and other page elements that aren’t part of the documentation content itself. This keeps results focused and avoids repeated elements like nav menus from polluting relevance.

For details on how the main content area is detected, see Detection logic.