December 2023 Newsletter
New results page design
Available soon in beta
We are happy to announce a major redesign for our hosted search results page, available soon in beta. Used by 70% of our searchers, our results page offers a complete feature set right out of the box, with no development or coding required by agencies. We have redesigned the look and feel of the page to leverage the U.S. Web Design System (USWDS) and ensure a good searcher experience in line with major commercial search engines. In addition to the user experience and aesthetic enhancements, this update will ensure we meet the requirements of the 21st Century IDEA. The new page is built using React, with an emphasis on speed and section 508 accessibility.
Who does this change apply to?
About one-third of federal domains use Search.gov. Of those, most choose to use our hosted results page, and this change applies to this group. If your agency uses our results API to power your search results page that you build and maintain on your website, no changes here will affect you.
Please email us at search@gsa.gov if you would like to beta-test these new pages.
We will share more details about this release next month!
User roles improvements focus groups
You are invited!
We currently offer one user role for site administrators of Search.gov experiences. However, there are many use cases for a view-only role to see analytics and the search configuration.
For this reason and as part of our overall service improvements roadmap, we’ll soon be working on creating a more robust roles and permissions structure to allow for read-only or reduced-access roles.
As always, your feedback is very important to us so we’ll be hosting two virtual focus groups on January 17 and 24 (11 am-12 pm ET). The main objective of these focus groups is to learn your specific needs and requirements related to user roles.
If you would like to participate in this conversation, please contact us. Early next month, we will share the Zoom details to join this discussion.
Release Notes
Want to learn about the latest features, fixes, and focuses of the Search team? We post monthly Release Notes on our website.