2021 system highlights

Every month we publish release notes, highlighting the improvements we’ve made to our technology. The biggest changes in 2021 revolved around system security and legacy code cleanup, paving the way for new feature development in 2022.

• Indexing Improvements: We now visit sitemaps to scan for new and updated content every 2 hours. We made updates to our backend infrastructure to make it easier to manually queue URLs for indexing. We also improved the performance and stability of our indexing process.
• Localizations Update: We moved management of multilingual support from the GSA/Punchcard repository to the GSA/search-gov repository.
• Legacy code removals: We removed the old results display code environment, clearing the path for our results page redesign. We also removed support for the legacy V1 /api/search/ endpoint.
• Security updates: We improved security settings on our session cookies, input validation in certain fields in the Admin Center, security of our third-party integrations, and performed many gem upgrades, changes, and removals to maintain a secure environment.
• System upgrades: Ruby, Rails, Elasticsearch, MySQL, jQuery.
• System load management: We improved our ability to block unwanted queries and react to flux in traffic. We also implemented auto-scaling on portions of our infrastructure.