Incident post-mortem: Timeline of NBER actions

• 2007: We acquire a Google Mini (search appliance). Goal is to allow customized search results based on type of result (paper, chapter, book, etc). This can not be done on the Google Mini, so we write pre- and post- processing perl code
• 2012: Google Mini dies. We point our site search code to Google Custom Search instead
• 2016: Xapian proof of concept implemented as possible replacement
• 2017 D=0 (Thursday 4/27): Google turns off html results
• D+1: partial progress using Bing as back-end
• D+2: decision to use DuckDuckGo.com as back-end
• D+2: we see rate limit on DDG
• D+4 (Monday 5/1): DDG back-end goes live
• D+8: receive answer from DDG, can not remove rate limit
• D+8: decision to use Xapian as back-end
• D+14: Xapian back-end goes live