Skip to main content

Who can apply?

We built DocSearch from the ground up with the idea of improving search on large technical documentations. For this reason, we are offering a free hosting version to all online technical documentations.

We're always sad to have to turn down applications, but with the number of requests we receive every day, we've had to focus on fair criteria. We hope you understand.

The checklist#

To have your request validated, we'll ask that you check all the following points.

  • You must be the owner of the website, or at least have the permissions to update its content. You'll have to include a JavaScript snippet to enable DocSearch.

  • Your website must be publicly available. We do not host search indices for websites that are available behind an authentication or a private network.

  • Your website must be a documentation website. We do not index blogs or commercial content.

  • Your website must have some final content. We won't index empty websites nor those filled with lorem ipsum placeholder content. Please, wait until you have written some documentation before applying. We would be happy to help you as soon as you have a steady design.

If in doubt, don't hesitate to apply and we'll figure it out together.

Even if we cannot accept your request, this does not mean that you cannot enjoy great search on your website. DocSearch is entirely open source and you can run it yourself, or use any of our other API clients to take advantage of Algolia's features.

Priority#

We're receiving dozens of requests every day, and while we strive to answer them all as fast as we can, we sometimes give priority to some based on the following criteria:

  • 😀 If your project is open source, we'll handle it before any other closed-source product. We love open source and want to help as much as we can.

  • 🙂 If you're using one of our official integrations, creating your config will be much faster for us.

  • 🙁 If we need to render your website in the browser through JavaScript, it means that we'll have to crawl it through a much slower browser emulation. We highly recommend that you put in place server-side rendering for the useful textual content.