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I'm evaluating comment systems and although I see disqus used in many cases I'm not sure if it is the best choice for me as I am uncertain that my site's own search system could show comments in search results.

Can built-in search or Apache Solr find comments on the site made with Disqus ?

Research I have shown so far is that Disqus has Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) -- for external search engines e.g. Google:-

But what about your own search system on your site, or using Solr for example. I'd prefer not to use Custom Google Search to search my site as I want control over how my results are shown.

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That depends. If you integrate the disqus commenting system with the default javascript they provide, the content is loaded in the client browser, not on the server. Most search engines "don't speak" javascript, but only see the code the server delivers. So when you use the client side solution, I think most indexing systems will not be able to process the comments.

As disqus also has an API there is a possibility to load the content on the server and render your own html code (e.g. with PHP). In this case, the content should be indexed by the default crawling mechanisms the common search tools use.

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  • +1 @Michael yes I was aware of the API so thanks for corroborating that though I hadn't dug in deep enough into to get a definitive answer. Now, after a further look, can say that it looks more likely as there is an example here that accesses sub-comments of a thread - getting close to what I want. So it looks like if it is possible I'd need to write bespoke code (that's fine though significant effort but would aim to opensource it) but my concern is if API changes, that investment wasted.
    – therobyouknow
    Commented Aug 21, 2013 at 13:50
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    The second link goes to the source code of a PHP based API wrapper, I am pretty sure the most common language wrappers already exist, so there is no need to code it yourself. Which programming language do you use? If the API is changed, the people providing the wrappers will surely be glad if you support them updating the code, so I don't think that this is a big issue as long as you don't code in some strange programming language and you have to update it on your own.
    – Michael
    Commented Aug 21, 2013 at 13:57
  • I use PHP and can see that there is considerable support for this language as indicated in the example I gave in my earlier comment that accesses sub-comments of a thread. The bespoke code I talked of is the code that would extract and "present" the comment data to a search engine for it to "pick it up" when searches are performed. My concern was that if the API changes, then this code that relies upon it will need to be adjusted -this could be small or big - it's an unknown.
    – therobyouknow
    Commented Aug 21, 2013 at 14:05
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    $disqus = new DisqusAPI($secret_key); $disqus->posts->details(array('post'=>1, 'version'=>'3.0'));
    – Michael
    Commented Aug 21, 2013 at 14:31
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    let us continue this discussion in chat
    – Michael
    Commented Aug 21, 2013 at 14:31
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You can use the wordpress plugin to see if they can index the disqus comments http://www.searchblox.com/easy-faceted-search-plugin-wordpress-site

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