Global Search

[Gerry]

I mentioned during the last product update meeting that we have been working on improving the global search capability.  This is not an incremental improvement, this particular change is a complete ground-up reimplementation of our search infrastructure, everything from server clusters, application and search and security layers have all been completely re-worked.  Our initial goal is to provide like-for-like function, which means as we roll out, you should not really notice any difference apart from: -

* Global searches will (should in most cases anyway) provide you more relevant results, the underlying technology stack we are using is much more advanced than what we had in place before.
* Global searches should be faster. 
* Global searches will be much less error prone (we had a lot of failures behind the scenes which made the search experience not as good as it should have been)
 

We are currently in the rollout phase, some instances have already been rolled out, and we are doing more all of the time, this involves a lot of re-indexing of stuff, so it takes a while, another 4-6 weeks at least we predict when the whole customer estate will have been migrated.  

This change is a much bigger deal than is apparent in use, specifically though, this paves the way for much better and more unified search capabilities, which of course will be continuously rolled out and deployed. 

Gerry

[Gerry]

I am delighted to be able to say that the new global search rollout is now complete for all production instances.  As well as being a significant improvement over the prior search capability, we are really only scratching the surface of what this can be put to work to do, as such, this migration gives us a brand new, and very capable search capability which we will be taking advantage of over time. 

In the mean time, having had this in the works for well over 20 months, this is live and your global search results should be a lot better, be a lot faster and from our point of view, a lot easier to scale, maintain and build on.  Over the next couple of months we will be monitoring, tuning, optimising and of course, ripping out all of the service, code and data that relates to the old, out of service search system, clearing a path to future evolution and improvements. 

Gerry