Application: search-api

Search API for GOV.UK

• GitHub: search-api
• Ownership: #user-experience-measurement-govuk
• Hosting: AWS, on the search machine class
• Category: APIs
• Rake tasks: Run a Rake task on Integration, Staging or ⚠️ Production ⚠️
• Links:
  • www.gov.uk/api/search.json
  • Sentry (error tracking)
  • Puppet configuration
  • Deploy scripts
  • Deployment dashboard

Relevant manual pages

• Content that doesn’t show up correctly in search or list pages
• Make a new document type available to search
• Reindex an Elasticsearch index

Example pages published by search-api

• Search
• News and communications
• Research and statistics
• Guidance and regulation
• Policy papers and consultations
• Services
• Transparency and freedom of information releases
• Official documents

README

Search API (née “rummager”) indexes content into Elasticsearch and serves the GOV.UK Search API.

GOV.UK applications use the API to search and filter GOV.UK content. For example, alphagov/finder-frontend uses the search API to render site search and finder pages (such as gov.uk/aaib-reports).

Search API also provides a public API: https://www.gov.uk/api/search.json?q=taxes.

API documentation

If you would like to use the Search API, please see the Search API documentation.

You can also find some examples in the blog post: “Use the search API to get useful information about GOV.UK content”.

Technical documentation

Search API is a Sinatra application that interfaces with Elasticsearch.

You can use the GOV.UK Docker environment to run the application and its tests with all the necessary dependencies. Follow the usage instructions to get started.

Use GOV.UK Docker to run any commands that follow.

Running the test suite

bundle exec rake

Additional Docs

• How documents are indexed
• How documents are retrieved
• Search relevancy - uses AWS Sagemaker
• New indexing process: how to update a format to use the new indexing process
• Schemas: how to work with schemas and the document types
• Popularity information: Search API uses Google Analytics data to improve search results.
• Publishing document finders: Information about publishing finders using rake tasks
• Learning to rank: Guidance on how to run the ranking model locally

Licence

MIT License