Dear valued member of ICANN Community,
As you know with the launch of the new ICANN
website, several attempts were made to improve the
Search capabilities using a new engine, Elastic
Search. This was based on feedback from the community
to improve search capabilities. Elastic search
relies on sophisticated algorithms and weightings to
optimize search results based on document metadata
tagged in our pages. Due to the high volume of
content (over 60,000 pages) on the site, this approach
uncovered some missing data that resulted in Search
not being as effective as we would have liked. We have
therefore concluded that our best approach at this
time is to revert back to the Google Search API on the
website.
You can read further about the Search background
and technology in the paper that has been previously
shared with the community digital advisory group.
We wanted you to be the first to preview the Search as
part of a planned Beta. Over the next few weeks, we
will gradually widen the rollout which will allow us
to gather additional feedback. Please feel free to
send us any feedback that you think may be useful in
the Feedback channel on the website or to
laura.bengford@icann.org.
You will also notice a slight difference in the
appearance of Search as we have moved it to the top of
the screen in the blue bar and included a white box to
make it more visible. This was also a result of
feedback from the community.
We know how important "search" is to using
ICANN.org and
for the community to do it's work, and we apologize for
any inconvenience as we try and find the best path
forward. Thank you for your feedback.