March 2018 Newsletter
Summary
Search.gov monthly newsletter - March 2018. Lessons learned so far and an update on progress through our indexing transition.
Transition Update
Lessons Learned and Progress to Date
We’ve come a long way since we announced our move away from commercial search engines as our primary source of web results. Lessons learned through working with many of you have shifted our thinking about the shape and focus of our indexing work. High level notes:
- We are now emphasizing XML sitemaps as our primary source for indexing your content.
- We’re deemphasizing the i14y indexing API, though we will continue to support both the API and related indexes.
- We’ve completed our shift away from the Google Site Search API, and are using our own indexes where we used to use Google.
- Low traffic search sites can expect to remain on Bing until you hear from us.
Read more about these and other points in our latest blog post.
Get Your XML Sitemaps Ready
A good XML sitemap will help us index your content, and will give you a boost out on Google as well
XML Sitemaps - essential information
Robots.txt files help search engines find your sitemaps. Find out what you need to know.
Survey Coming Soon
Tell us how we’re doing
Last year, our service was moved into the Federal Acquisitions Service (FAS) as part of a reorganization. Every spring, FAS conducts a customer satisfaction survey, and we will be included this year. It’s been a while since we’ve been able to conduct a survey, so we’re looking forward to getting your feedback.
On or around April 17 you should receive a survey via email with the subject line "GSA wants your feedback." Search.gov may not be mentioned in the text of the email, but the questions on the survey itself will be for our service.
We hope you will take a few minutes to fill it out and let us know how you you think we’re doing. It was feedback about Bing on surveys like this that led us to tackle the big indexing transition we’re mid-way through. As we look to the future, your feedback is appreciated.
Thank you in advance!
Release Notes
Want to learn about the latest features, fixes, and focuses of the Search team? We post monthly Release Notes on our website.
Highlights:
- We can now index off of XML sitemaps, and have improved how we extract the titles of your pages.
- We’re compliant with BOD 18-01.