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March 2021 Newsletter

Summary

We’re pleased to release our 2020 Year In Review. We also did a big cleanup of outdated typeahead suggestions.

2020 Year in-Review

The searches that shaped 2020 and our system highlights

2020-Year-In-Review-Cover-Full

With 2020 in the rear view mirror, we’re excited to share our Year In Review:

2020 in numbers:

  • 320,581,805 queries
  • ~2,200 gov websites
  • 20 top topics
  • 365 days of connecting people with what they need

Many public needs are the same year to year, and many were unique to 2020. Here are the most frequently searched topics: 

  • Loans
  • Benefits
  • Space
  • Immigration
  • Forms
  • Census
  • Covid-19

System Highlights:

  • Released a new Clicks Tracking API to enable analytics capture for Results API users
  • Updated our Login.gov integration for a consistent experience through login & logout
  • Added Account Deactivation Reminders
  • Migrated the Search.gov website to the Federalist platform
  • Upgraded Rails
  • Upgraded ElasticSearch 
  • Scaled up our infrastructure to support periods of heavy query volume
  • Upgraded our security support to improve monitoring and risk mitigation across production and staging environments
  • Added backend indexing improvements (reindexing support and invalid sitemap/URL handling)

Read the full report

Spring Cleaning

Type-Ahead Suggestions Clean up

We have successfully removed approximately 825 thousand type-ahead suggestions that hadn’t been used by searchers since late 2019. Our system was not impacted by this action but customers may notice some changes to the type-ahead suggestions. If you have any questions or experience any issues related to this change, please contact us at search@gsa.gov

Product Update

Our Roadmap for this Quarter: See our roadmap for this quarter, now posted on our website. Built based on your feedback, it reflects what’s most important to you, and prioritized accordingly.

Content Frequency: If your agency is indexing with us using a sitemap, great news: we are now fetching content every two hours!.

Release Notes

Want to learn about the latest features, fixes, and focuses of the Search team? We post monthly Release Notes on our website.

Read the Latest Notes


View all newsletters
March 01, 2021