About
Your organization probably has other places where people look for content, such as an intranet portal or a company-wide search engine.
Federated search lets people find and watch your site's media in those places too, without having to go to your site first. It works with Content Hubs, the legacy Video Portal, and LMS Extensions.
Federated search is a premium module. To add it to your site, contact your Kaltura representative.
Two ways to use federated search
Federated search has two modules, one for each way of sharing your content. You can use one or both.
| Module | Use it to | How it works |
|---|---|---|
| Federatedsearchinteractive | Show your media in widgets on other websites, such as a video news widget on your intranet homepage, a video search box on a team portal, or a video gallery on a portal for customers, partners, or alumni. | You set up saved searches, called search producers. The other website requests a producer's URL and gets the results as JSON data, which its developers use to build the widget. |
| Federatedsearchindexing | Add your media to your organization's own search engine, which brings together content from many sources in one index. | The module creates two feeds: a seed feed with all your published content, and a sync feed with recent changes. The search engine loads the seed feed once, and then checks the sync feed regularly. |
Both modules need the Federatedsearchcore module, which holds the code they share. Enable it before you enable the other modules.
Your content stays under your control
- Only published content is shared. Private media never appears in federated search.
- Your developers use an app token to access the content. An app token gives limited access: it can only reach certain content and services, and you can revoke it at any time. You never need to share your account's admin secret.
- Your developers don't need access to your Configuration Management console, and they don't need to learn Kaltura. Apart from creating a Kaltura Session (KS) with the app token, they work with standard feeds and JSON data.
Who does what
- You, the site administrator - Set up the modules, create the app tokens, and give your developers what they need. For instructions, see the Federatedsearchinteractive module and Federatedsearchindexing module articles.
- Your developers - Build the widgets or connect the search engine to the feeds. For technical details, see [Advanced users] Process federated search JSON data and [Advanced users] Process federated search feeds.
