Index RSS Feeds

The easiest way to search through RSS feeds content is to link the feeds to SearchUnify RSS Crawler. Once linked, SearchUnify indexes the content as soon as it appears. You can limit indexing to the latest batch or keep all content in the index. Up to twelve content fields are supported, including links, descriptions, and titles.

PERMISSIONS

SearchUnify ignores user permissions during searches. All indexed files can be searched by all users.

Establish a Connection

  1. Navigate to Content Sources and click Add New Content Sources.

  1. Find RSS through the search box and click Add.

  2. Under the Authentication tab, enter the following details and click Connect:
  • Name. Give your content source a name.
  • Client URL. Each RSS feed has a URL usually ending in .rss or .xml. Enter the URL of your RSS feed here.

  • Language. Select the content language. You can select multiple languages if your RSS feed content is in more than one language. English is selected by default.

Set up Crawl Frequency

The first crawl is always manual and is performed after configuring the content source. In Choose A Date, pick a date. Only the data created after the selected date will be crawled.

Smart Crawls can be used while setting up a frequency crawl, which will be done at the end of this article. When Smart Crawls is inactive, then during each frequency crawl the previously-indexed data is removed from index and a fresh index is generated with up-to-date data. When it's turned on, then the previously-indexed data remains unaffected and appends new data on top of the existing indexed data.

For now, ignore Smart Crawls, keep the Frequency to never, and click Set.

Rules

Define the RSS content fields to be indexed. items is the sole object supported as of now. Click on the icon to view the list of all the pre-configured fields.

NOTE.

Only admins are advised to edit or delete the fields.

Save the Settings.

After the First Crawl

Return to the Content Sources screen and click in Actions. The number of indexed documents is updated after the crawl is complete. You can view crawl progress in in Actions. Documentation on crawl progress is in View Crawl Logs.

Once the first crawl is complete, click in Actions to open the content source for editing, and set a crawl frequency.

  1. In Choose a Date, click to fire up a calendar and select a date. Only the data created or updated after the selected date is indexed.

  2. The following options are available for the Frequency field:

    • When Never is selected, the content source is not crawled until an admin opts for a manual crawl on the Content Sources screen.

    • When Minutes is selected, a new dropdown appears where the admin can choose between three values: 15, 20, and 30. Picking 20 means that the content source crawling starts every 20 minutes.

    • When Hours is selected, a new dropdown is displayed where the admin can choose between eight values between 1, 2, 3, 4, 6, 8, 12, and 24. Selecting 8 initiates content crawling every 8 hours.

    • When Daily is selected, a new dropdown is displayed where the admin can pick a value between 0 and 23. If 15 is selected, the content source crawling starts at 3:00 p.m. (1500 hours) each day.

    • When Day of Week is selected, a new dropdown is displayed where the admin can pick a day of the week. If Tuesday is chosen, then content source crawling starts at 0000 hours on every Tuesday.

    • When Day of Month is selected, a new dropdown appears where the admin can select a value between 1 and 30. If 20 is chosen, then content source crawling starts on the 20th of each month.

      It is recommended to pick a date between the 1st and 28th of the month. If 30 is chosen, then the crawler may throw an error in February. The error will be “Chosen date will not work for this month.”

    • When Yearly is selected, the content source crawling starts at midnight on 1 January each year.

    Fig. The content source crawling starts at 00:00 on each Tuesday.

  3. Click Set to save the crawl frequency settings.

  4. Click Save.