How do I need to configure an external search engine to scan a Confluence installation?

[Sorin Sbarnea (Citrix)]

How do I need to configure an external search engine to scan a Confluence installation?

[Dennis Kromhout van der Meer]

Be sure that the pages you want to be indexed by an external search engine (like Google) are accessible by an anonymous user. You can use Google Webmaster Tools to add your Confluence instance to the Google search index.

If I misinterpreted your question, please elaborate on what you're trying to achieve.

[Matthew J. Horn]

When you say "external search engine", are you referring to a site like google.com, or are you talking about a search appliance that resides on another server within your organization?

[Sorin Sbarnea (Citrix)]

Exactly, I was trying to configure SearchBlox to crawl jira.

[Matthew J. Horn]

Should just be able to point it to the server root. As long as you have no robots.txt file blocking access, it should be able to index the confluence site.

[Sorin Sbarnea (Citrix)]

It is not so easy, I do not want the spider to index all the previous version of the documents. The default robots.txt does allow this and it pollutes the indexes.

[Matthew J. Horn]

can you configure the robots.txt to exclude paths to previous versions of teh doc? For example, our site uses space names to differentiate between versions, so we could exclude URLs that match the older versions' space names.