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Search.gov Roadmap Fiscal Year 2022 Quarter 3

Overview

At Search.gov we aim to provide an excellent public search experience, a self-service search administration experience, and a rock-solid secure and compliant infrastructure to support it all, while keeping the cost of search down, government-wide.

We know it’s helpful for you, our partners at federal agencies, to know what we have planned for our service, to support your planning for your own web platforms. This roadmap shows what we are working on now, and what we plan to be working after that. We’ll update this roadmap quarterly.

FY 2020 Q3: April–June 2020

Now

  • Address Critical Infrastructure Needs
    • We are working on upgrading Elasticsearch to ensure strong performance on Search.gov.
  • Indexing Improvements
    • By improving pieces of the indexing process, we intend to help sites improve the search experience for end-users.
  • Results API Updates
    • For customers using the results API, we are working to include more features that are available for our users who use the hosted results page.
  • COVID-19 Support
    • We are dedicating additional developer capacity to meet the needs of new and existing sites whose traffic has been impacted by the pandemic.

Next

  • Search.gov Website Design Updates
  • Synonym Handling
    • We will be investigating ways to support synonyms and other natural language searching features, while keeping query response time as fast as you expect it to be.
  • Improving Indexing for Users Without Sitemaps
    • Many of our customers are unable to publish automated XML sitemaps, for various reasons. We will modernize our full-text RSS-based indexing processes, to bring that content into our primary index. We will look into additional methods after we can assess how many sites still have difficulties.
  • Supporting Boolean Operators
    • One of the features we get requests for most frequently is support for Boolean operators: good old fashioned AND, OR, and NOT. At this time we anticipate supporting these features through the basic search box, and do not plan to offer a separate advanced search form. We also do not plan to support NEAR.

Later

  • Search.gov Results Page Redesign
  • Analytics Improvements
  • Cloud Infrastructure Improvements
  • Add Customization/Configuration Features to the Search.gov Admin Center

If you have questions or comments, please feel free to reach out to our team.