Cross-space searches in a variant-based site

[JaniceManwiller]

We currently use GitBook to publish user guides for our 3 products. To navigate between them, I currently have a dropdown list in the sites headers for each guide.

It was suggested to us that instead of the dropdown list in the header, we use variants to combine the guides into a single site.

For the default variant, I would create a sort of landing page with links to the guides as well as to other content outside of GitBook. That would allow us to maintain the current URLs for the user guides.

We had previously used GitBook for a documentation landing page, but one issue we ran into is that there is (as far as I can tell) no concept of cross-space search, and no way to completely hide the search field.

So on the landing page, users would see the search field and expect to be able to find content from across all of the guides. But the search only applied to the landing page itself. This caused a bit of confusion and disappointment.

It would be nice to have a cross-space search that allowed users to search across all of the spaces in the site.

Alternatively, it would also work to be able to hide the search field entirely on individual spaces in the site, to not show a feature that doesn't really work for a particular space.

[zenoachtig]

Hi @JaniceManwiller! Perhaps I've misunderstood your feature request, but cross-space search is absolutely supported. You can see it in action on the GitBook docs: we search across all sections by default, and users have the option to narrow down to a single section.

Small semantic note: your three products will most likely need to be three separate sections, not variants of each other for our search to treat them correctly. By default we search across all sections but only a single variant at a time, since variants represent semantic copies of each other.

All this to say it's definitely possible to have cross-space search and have the searchbar on your landing page find everything in the site 😊

[JaniceManwiller]

Unfortunately sections requires the Ultimate licensing plan, which we are not planning to purchase.

I do know that variants were basically intended for different versions of the same content, but the suggestion to use variants instead of the header dropdown came from a GitBook representative.

[JaniceManwiller]

We are exploring the option to create a single Ultimate site for our documentation. Looking at the GitBook docs for this, want to confirm the following:

• There is only a single heading for the site. There are no separate headings for each space.
• There is only the cross-site search. You cannot add a space-specific search. So once they're looking at the guide for a specific product, I would want them to be able to search just within that guide without having to specify the product name.