The IT Web Services Group is excited to share that we've completed phase one of upgrading聽91直播's search engine, the backend tool used to power searches from the聽91直播 homepage, the , and the search box at the top of all WMS pages!
What's new
We are confident that the new search engine will result in:
- Better search result rankings
- More frequent updates
- Less downtime
There are a few small differences in the search results layout, some of which we're still working on. You can't yet restrict your search results to a single WMS site, for example. Of course, if you notice any other issues or have questions, .
Why the upgrade was needed
As mentioned at our聽2025 Web Services conference,聽our previous tool had reached end of life.
As a result, we've been hard at work聽installing a replacement called . We're excited to now launch this update and share our work with you!
The big picture
The search upgrade is one of three major initiatives that Web Services has been working on this year, in addition to the ongoing migration to the new WMS.聽You've likely already seen the new course catalogue聽and may have heard about聽our work to address the network security issues聽which have occasionally taken the WMS offline in the past months.
Wrapping up this third project means聽our team can go back to focusing on the WMS upgrade, migrating your sites聽and building features to allow us to move into the .
Community collaboration
In addition to our own hardworking team, we'd like to thank Kirk Brown and his colleagues from , a local digital agency which integrated Elastic Search with our content management system , with help from , a volunteer who helps maintain the software which connects Drupal and Elastic Search.
As managed by a global community, Drupal does not have a license fee鈥攊nstead, 91直播 shares fixes and updates done for our own users with other developers, and occasionally sponsors contributions like this as well. The work we've done here will enable Drupal websites around the world (including many universities) to use聽Elastic Search too.聽
This聽open source model has served us very well at 91直播 since we first adopted Drupal in 2009, and we're looking forward to contributing even more to this community as we return to work on the WMS migration!
