Yesterday’s outage affecting one of our providers caused serious issues with the availability of search results in MevaSearch. Some users may have experienced a complete lack of results or other disruptions to the search engine.
We treated this incident as a top priority. Today, our team deployed a critical infrastructure update that significantly improves MevaSearch’s resilience to outages affecting external data sources.
Greater Resilience to Outages in MevaSearch
New Safeguards for Service Outages
MevaSearch currently uses multiple independent sources of search results, including:
• Brave Search
• WebAtlas Index
• Wikipedia
• Mojeek
• Odysee
From now on, an outage affecting one of these sources should no longer result in a complete lack of search results in MevaSearch.
If one of the APIs becomes unavailable, the system will automatically detect the issue, skip the unavailable source, and continue displaying results provided by the remaining operational services. This means that an outage affecting a single provider should no longer impact the availability of the entire search engine.
• Brave Search
• WebAtlas Index
• Wikipedia
• Mojeek
• Odysee
From now on, an outage affecting one of these sources should no longer result in a complete lack of search results in MevaSearch.
If one of the APIs becomes unavailable, the system will automatically detect the issue, skip the unavailable source, and continue displaying results provided by the remaining operational services. This means that an outage affecting a single provider should no longer impact the availability of the entire search engine.
Emergency Search Results Cache
We have also introduced an additional layer of protection in the form of an emergency results cache.
If all external search-result sources become unavailable at the same time, MevaSearch will be able to display previously cached results for popular search queries. This will help preserve the core functionality of the search engine even during a major, widespread outage.
The mechanism operates automatically and requires no action from users.
If all external search-result sources become unavailable at the same time, MevaSearch will be able to display previously cached results for popular search queries. This will help preserve the core functionality of the search engine even during a major, widespread outage.
The mechanism operates automatically and requires no action from users.
What Does This Update Change?
Following the deployment of these new safeguards, MevaSearch can now:
• automatically detect unavailable search-result sources,
• skip failed or unavailable APIs,
• continue using the remaining operational sources,
• reduce the impact of individual provider outages on the search engine,
• display cached emergency results for popular queries when all external sources are unavailable.
Our goal is to ensure that MevaSearch remains available and useful even when part of our infrastructure or external services are experiencing an outage.
Yesterday’s incident showed that infrastructure resilience must continue to evolve. Today’s update is an important step toward making MevaSearch a more reliable, resilient, and stable search engine.
We would like to thank everyone who reported the issues and remained patient during the outage. We will continue developing MevaSearch to make search faster, more private, and available even in challenging situations.
• automatically detect unavailable search-result sources,
• skip failed or unavailable APIs,
• continue using the remaining operational sources,
• reduce the impact of individual provider outages on the search engine,
• display cached emergency results for popular queries when all external sources are unavailable.
Our goal is to ensure that MevaSearch remains available and useful even when part of our infrastructure or external services are experiencing an outage.
Yesterday’s incident showed that infrastructure resilience must continue to evolve. Today’s update is an important step toward making MevaSearch a more reliable, resilient, and stable search engine.
We would like to thank everyone who reported the issues and remained patient during the outage. We will continue developing MevaSearch to make search faster, more private, and available even in challenging situations.