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Add Your Content to Our Indexes: An Overview

Find it in the Admin Center: Search.gov Home > Admin Center > YourSite > Manage Content > Content Overview

To display the results on your search results page, we index content from various sources. Each time a searcher enters a query on your site, we determine which indexes answer the searcher’s question and display results from them. This means a single search results page often includes items from several indexes.

When you first add a site, we pull the homepage you listed into your domains list, and populate any social media accounts (Flickr, Twitter, and YouTube) and RSS feeds that are linked from your homepage. Use the Discover option on this Content Overview page to automatically (re)discover the RSS and social media accounts on your site’s homepage, or any other page you want to scan.

You can also add content manually to each of the sections listed above.

Add Your Web Pages

When you add your domains, we’ll show results for all of your web pages listed within these domains. By default, these web results are powered by Bing.

If you don’t like the default web results, you can choose to use another index. Options follow.

Option 1. Use Our Search.gov Web Index. We can index content that is sent to us by API or RSS. Email us at search@gsa.gov and we’ll work with you to determine the best way for us to get your content.

Option 2. Use Another Web Index of Your Choice. Most search indexes expose their results as XML. If you have another search index that renders XML, let us know and we’ll work with you to determine if you can use it.

Once you’ve added your web pages, you can create Collections to give searchers the option to narrow (or, less frequently, broaden) the results to a specific subset of pages.

Add Your Images

  • Flickr. When you add your Flickr URL, we’ll index your Flickr photostream.
  • Photo Galleries on Your Site. Do you have a multimedia gallery on your website for your agency’s images? When you add a media RSS (MRSS) for your gallery, we’ll index its images.
  • Images on Your Web Pages. We backfill the image results from social media and photo galleries with the images published on the web pages of the domain(s) you’ve added.

Add Your Videos

  • YouTube. When you add your YouTube account, we’ll index your YouTube videos. We will also index any videos in your playlists.
  • Video Galleries on Your Site. Do you have a multimedia gallery on your website for your agency’s videos? When you add a media RSS (MRSS) for your gallery, we’ll index its videos.

Add Your News

  • RSS Feeds. Do you have RSS feeds set up for your press releases, blog posts, or other newsworthy content? When you add an RSS, we’ll index the items on that feed.
  • Twitter. Does your agency use Twitter? You can add your Twitter handle, and we’ll index your tweets. You have the option of asking us to index the tweets from other Twitter users that you maintain in public lists on Twitter. Because tweets are ephemeral, we display tweets from the past three days when they match a searcher’s query.

Add Your Recommendations

Create Best Bets (Text or Graphics) to promote specific results. Best Bets appear at the top of the results page when a searcher’s query matches the text of their titles, descriptions, or keywords.

Turn It All On

After you’ve added your content, be sure to set the display options to control how each index appears on your search results page.

We also have three pre-built, government-centric content modules that you can opt to turn on, too.

  • Job Openings. Toggle on the Jobs module to show your agency’s job openings from USAJobs.
  • Federal Register Documents. Toggle on the Federal Register module to show your agency’s documents posted on FederalRegister.gov.
  • Health Topics. Toggle on the Health Topics module to show authoritative health information from MedlinePlus and ClinicalTrials.gov.

Troubleshooting tip: We’ve connected your site to your agency on the backend. If you’re not seeing jobs or Federal Register documents specific to your agency, email us so we can fix the agency setting for your site.