July 2023 Release Notes

Improvements

• Results Page Redesign: We’ve continued progress on updating our frontend components.
  • We prepared the backend data for Images Search Page and RSS feeds.
  • We implemented the user interface for some types of search results:
    • Federal Register documents
    • Health topics
    • RSS Feed
    • Videos
  • We implemented the user interface for our Search page alert feature.
  • We began internationalization for the new results page.
• Results matching improvements:
  • We continued progress looking at alphanumeric strings, such as form numbers or policy numbers. This will support searchers looking for things like a “DD 214,” but searching for “DD214” - a subtle but technically challenging difference.
  • We built an AI model, and new staging infrastructure to support training the model.
• Spider investigations:
  • We continued our investigation of open source spidering tools and features.
• Updates, upgrades, and other codebase improvements:
  • We completed planning for upgrading Rails on the rest of our sub-applications.
  • We completed scrubbing certain controlled unclassified information (CUI) from our search log archives. This data is sometimes entered by searchers as query terms. Proactive scrubbing for newly searched-for CUI has long been in place.
  • We upgraded Sidekiq and Jest to the latest versions.
  • We updated Terraform, our SSL certificate, gems, and security agents.
  • We began expanding our encryption posture to include components not connected to the internet.

Fixes

• We investigated and resolved queries to a backend data interface that were timing out for larger domains.