This weekend Trip released the latest update; hopefully you won’t have noticed. The new index has gone live! Last year we released the new site design, that was a rewrite of the front-end of the site, the bit users interact with. The latest rewrite, which went live yesterday, was the back-end. The index is the bit that’s responsible for how we grab and process new documents. Using a car analogy – the front-end is the bodywork and the back-end is the engine!

We announced the rewrite back in February 2020 and I said at the time it will be a massive undertaking, but it was even more complex than we imagined. But, it was necessary. Some nerd bits here:

  • We’ve moved from a monolithic architecture to a series of cloud-based microservices.
  • We’re using the latest javascript framework for both front and back ends.
  • Out has gone Cold Fusion and C# and in has come React and nodeJs.
  • In total there are now over half a million lines of code.

Due to the rewrite we have not really been developing new features to the site, but we’ve been planning them. The next few weeks will be monitoring the site and checking things are working as expected. After that, we can start to move forward with improving the functionality of the site.

One important thing to note, the results will be slightly different from the results you’d have got last week and this is for two reasons:

  • Fewer results – due to us removing a load of dead links that had accumulated in the index.
  • More results – due to us improving the automated grabbing of articles from the likes of clinicaltrials.gov, RCTs from RobotReviewer.

If you spot any problems then please let me know: jon.brassey@tripdatabase.com