Tagged: COveo Integration

Coveo / Sitecore

Integrating External Website into Coveo Index for Seamless Search in Sitecore

I recently faced a scenario where I needed to integrate an external website into the Coveo Index and utilize it along with Sitecore Items on the website.

Let’s take my blog as an external data source and integrate it into the Coveo Index.

Trial Account

Feel free to create a new trial account and explore yourself – No credit card is needed it’s free and valid for 14 days. 

https://www.coveo.com/en/free-trial

Sitecore-Coveo-Extenal-Data-Source-Index-1.png

Note: Please make sure to use your business email.

Sources

After signing up, navigate to the Sources section.

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There are many sources available like Sitecore, Web, Sitemap, Sitemap, and many more.

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Web Source

Let’s focus on Web sources since we want to add my blog.

There are two Web sources available on-prem crawler and cloud-based crawler. Let’s choose the cloud-based crawler that is with the cloud icon on the right.

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When I start filling in my blog URL, it automatically detects the Sitemap for the website – Switching to the Sitemap URL for better Indexing performance.

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 After switching, it automatically updated to a Sitemap source with the appropriate sitemap URL.

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Content Security

The next step in the setup is Content Security.

We can permit for 

  • Same users and groups as in your content system (Grayed out due to trial account)
  • Everyone – Anonymous can access
  • Specific users and groups

By default, the everyone option is selected this would be best for public-facing content. 

Let’s change it to Specific users and groups for the demo.

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Add Source

Once added after a few minutes the source will be available. You can review other settings if further tuning is needed.

Sitecore-Coveo-Extenal-Data-Source-Index-9.png

 

Rebuild Source

Hit save and rebuild source that will initiate the rebuilding of the index.

Download logs provide more in-depth information – It’s super helpful when you face any issues.

Sitecore-Coveo-Extenal-Data-Source-Index-10.png

 

Content Browser

Once the rebuild is completed, Open the Content Browser from the left navigation under content to see the items in the index.

Sitecore-Coveo-Extenal-Data-Source-Index-11.png

 

It took only a couple of minutes to rebuild the entire blog this depends on the content of the site.

Yay! My entire blog is reindexed and ready to be consumed.

Sitecore-Coveo-Extenal-Data-Source-Index-12.png

 

Now, in the Sitecore Coveo Search interface, I could include this as an external source and use the items in the index. We could also set up a blog template and display the results with images. The source type can also be used as a facet.

Hope this helps.

Happy Searching!

March 24, 2025
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Coveo / Sitecore

Integrating Sitecore website with Coveo rapidly

Coveo-Sitecore-Intergration-Website-Source-11.png

In the previous blogs, we saw how to install and configure Coveo, troubleshoot, and diagnostics.

https://madhuanbalagan.com/install-and-configure-coveo-for-sitecore

https://madhuanbalagan.com/coveo-for-sitecore-troubleshooting-and-diagnostics

Now that Coveo is installed and ready to use, Let us add a Sitecore website to our instance of Coveo.

In the Coveo Admin Console, we can see that there is already a Coveo Master, and Web indexes are added by using the Sitecore Package Installation.

In this blog, I am showing an approach without any installation or configuration on the Sitecore Instance. This approach can be used with any non-Sitecore websites as well.

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Let’s add the Sitecore website as a web source of content.

We have lots of options to choose from let us focus on web for now.

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Here I’m adding my blog as a Source for our demo. 

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As soon as adding website name, it recognizes and shows the Sitemap URL and recommends adding it for better performance.

Coveo-Sitecore-Intergration-Website-Source-4.png

After adding the Sitemap URL, Coveo has a few configurations like Authentication and Content security.

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Since the blog is public-facing no security configuration would be needed.

Now add and build the source to populate the index. It might take time depending on the number of pages on the site.

Coveo-Sitecore-Intergration-Website-Source-7.png

When it’s completed it will turn green and show the number of items in the index and the size.

Coveo-Sitecore-Intergration-Website-Source-8.png

Now that the Index is built, let’s navigate to Content Browser to see if our pages show up.

Coveo-Sitecore-Intergration-Website-Source-9.png

Navigate to the content browser and search for a term.

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Voila! It works! Now you could integrate Coveo search on your site with a preferred approach.

Hope this helps.

Happy Sitecoring!

 

 

December 14, 2023
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