Firstly congratulations on an excellent API! We forget we were using it until the last few days (after service API changes) where we’ve been unable to serve our customers due to the following:
content in snippet moved to address_snippet
speed is significantly slower - exactly the same query used to take < 0.3s now takes 7s
not getting the same results for the same request
For us, where we simply use the API to allow our customers (companies) to input their company name so we can get their company number, the API changes have resulted in me being asked to use your data dumps instead of your API.
Is there anyway I can restrict my query to alleviate problems 2 and 3 above?
We are experiencing significant loads on our beta API at the moment. We are seeing peak spikes of (most recently) 816 requests a second… We have rolled out further infrastructure to absorb the extra load and are working to further extend this further.
With regards to the snippet change, we are committed to not making breaking changes. The snippet response member has always been to supply additional context information to help users understand why a particular resource matched the search term. Unfortunately, an error left this returning a single line address, even though the complete address was returned by an address member. The improved search will (in the future) allow some address matching, and thus a specific single line address_snippet member (in addition to the multi-line address member) was required to allow for matched address word highlighting (via the matches member). The snippet field is still that which returns additional context information, however the error has been fixed and it now returns appropriate context information, and where necessary.
The following two post (for completeness), which summarise the search improvements, might be helpful, certainly if you’ve not seen the second:
Hope that helps?!
We are actively continuing to monitor the search performance, and increase capacity as we can.
Chris
