September 2019 Newsletter
#Summary
We’ve got a lot of good things coming on our roadmap, the Login.gov integration is coming soon, and more.
Road Map
Signs Point to a Busy and Productive Fall
We’re heading into an ATO renewal season, so our roadmap includes just a few, but major items that we’d like to share with you.
- Upgrade our underlying components: Rails and Elasticsearch. There will be no downtime for searchers associated with these upgrades.
- Integrate with Login.gov to provide multi-factor authentication for your accounts (see below)
- Modernize our RSS-based full text indexing, to support search for static files when it’s not possible to add those files to a sitemap.
- Following our ATO renewal, we will update the design of our hosted results page, to bring it in line with the US Web Design System. We also hope to offer you more control over the header and footer design in your results page.
If you have questions about our ATO, contact us.
Multi-factor Authentication
Search.gov Integration with Login.gov
As previously announced, we will be integrating with Login.gov to introduce multi-factor authentication (MFA) and increase security in our system. As a result, our customers will need to provide secondary identification along with their Search.gov username and password to successfully access their Search.gov accounts.
Please note that the connection between our system and Login.gov isn’t live yet, so there’s no specific action to take for our customers other than other than create an account with Login.gov if you haven’t already. Here are some steps to get ready for this integration:
- If you already have an account with Login.gov, you may be all set. It would be good to confirm that the email address registered with them is the same as you have registered with us. If you need to update your address in our system, you can. If you need help, reach out to our team.
- If you don’t yet have an account with with Login.gov, you will need to. Use the same email address you have with your Search.gov when creating an account with Login.gov, then, set your password with them, and set up a second factor of identification.
- If your team uses a group email address to access our system, you’ll need to switch to individual user accounts. The integration with Login.gov requires all users to register individual emails as multi-factor authentication allows only one user per email address. Individual accounts are also better for the security of our system, so we can see who is making changes.
Drupal module officially unsupported
The usasearch Module Is Not Supported
We have updated the usasearch project page on Drupal.org to clarify that we no longer support the usasearch module, on Drupal 7 or 8. While we had posted a notice early in 2018 that the module was no longer supported, and encouraged users to post sitemaps which we would leverage for indexing, we only just officially marked the module as obsolete with no supported versions. We apologize for any confusion, if you have specific questions please let us know.
SEO Tips for Content Writing
From Our Colleagues at USAgov
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) should be your content’s best friend. Good SEO will increase your content’s visibility, making it easier to be found, therefore, more useful to your visitors.
Here is a good blog post by USAGov that includes some of the SEO content writing techniques to help your content higher in search engine rankings.
Release Notes
Want to learn about the latest features, fixes, and focuses of the Search team? We post monthly Release Notes on our website.