2026 Search & Navigation release notes

  • Updated

Follow this article to receive email notifications when new Search & Navigation packages are available for 2026. Product packages are found on the Optimizely NuGet server. 

Are you looking for release notes before January 2024? See the Optimizely Release Notes on the Optimizely World site.

You can find prior versions of user guides and when functionality was released or deprecated at the following locations:

June 30

EPiServer.Find 17.0.0

Enhancements

  • Improved attachment indexing to reduce memory use. Search & Navigation now streams attachment content to the index instead of holding each file in memory during serialization, which lowers memory use and garbage collection pressure when you index large files. Added the AttachmentSizeWarningBytes option (default 50 MB), which writes a trace warning when an attachment exceeds the threshold, so you can find oversized files before they slow indexing.
  • Improved sorting on unmapped fields so that sorting on a field that does not exist in the index no longer returns an HTTP 500 error. Search & Navigation resolves the field type automatically, including for nested sorts, and orders documents that lack the field according to the SortMissing setting.
  • Added warnings for large or slow content serialization. Search & Navigation now writes trace warnings during indexing when content takes too long to serialize, has a property that exceeds a size threshold, or has high serialization depth. This helps you optimize problematic content types before they affect production indexing performance. Configure the thresholds with the SerializationTimeWarningMs, SerializationSizeWarningBytes, and SerializationDepthWarningThreshold options in FindOptions.
  • Added the $$type suffix to all indexed property types for Elasticsearch 2.x compatibility, which prevents mapping conflicts when two properties share a name but have different types.

Bug fixes

  • FIND-4106 – Fixed an issue where filtering with the In method threw an exception when the value list contained a null entry. Null values are now ignored, and matches are returned for the remaining values.
  • FIND-12803 – Fixed an issue where searchable text in inline blocks was not captured in the SearchText property, because inline blocks have no content reference.
  • FIND-13989 – Fixed an issue where the Best Bets list failed to load with an HTTP 404 error in the Search & Navigation UI on .NET 9 and .NET 10. Also fixed a missing favicon on Search & Navigation pages.
  • FIND-14580 – Added a ReIndexAsync method to ContentIndexer that uses IndexAsync instead of the synchronous Index method, so custom indexing jobs can run fully asynchronously.
  • FIND-15107 – Fixed an issue where indexing jobs used too few parallel threads on multi-core servers. The IndexingJobMaxThread default is now 0, which lets Search & Navigation determine the thread count from available processors. Set a value greater than 0 to override it.
  • FIND-15108 – Fixed an issue where the serialization pipeline allocated excessive memory and increased garbage collection pressure during indexing, which could degrade performance under heavy load.
  • FIND-15205 – Fixed an issue where a query with leading or repeated whitespace returned an HTTP 500 error when using UsingSynonyms(). Whitespace is now collapsed to a single delimiter before the query is processed.
  • FIND-15283 – Fixed an issue where authenticated users could not search content available to the Everyone role unless it was explicitly configured. The Everyone role is now added to RolesWithReadAccess for authenticated users.

May 26

EPiServer.Find 16.8.0

Enhancements

  • Added management of statistical autocomplete phrases in the Search & Navigation UI. Statistical phrases are suggestions that Search & Navigation generates automatically from site visitors' previous successful searches. This lets you edit or delete those phrases from the Autocomplete tab to remove inappropriate or unwanted terms from the suggestions shown to site visitors.
  • Added pagination to the Explore view in the Search & Navigation UI. The Explore view loads indexed content one page at a time instead of retrieving every indexed item at once. This reduces load on the search service and the UI and removes the repeated background search requests that the previous behavior generated.
  • Updated the default maximum indexing depth for content areas to three levels. Search & Navigation limits the depth of nested ContentArea mappings to three levels by default, which protects search performance and cluster stability for sites that have deeply nested content structures. Override the default with the MaxDepthContentAreaConverter convention if your site requires a different depth.

Bug fix

  • FIND-15111 – Fixed an issue where the Search & Navigation menu did not display, and Search & Navigation features stopped working when a site used a custom relative path instead of the default EPiServer path. Search & Navigation no longer overrides the configured user interface and protected module paths during initialization.

March 3

EPiServer.Find 16.7.1

Enhancement

  • Added support for Search and Navigation for Content Management System 12 sites with Opti ID enabled. See Configure Opti ID for CMS 12 for more information.

Bug fixes

  • FIND-14387 – Fixed a performance issue that caused excessive CPU and memory consumption during content indexing. The system now uses a pre-compiled static Regex instance to reduce processing overhead.
  • FIND-14641 – Fixed an issue where items in the event indexing queue were not automatically removed after reaching the maximum retry count (default 10). 
  • FIND-14642 – Fixed an HTTP 500 error that occurred when filtering on a $$string field with a null value. The proxy now substitutes null string values with empty strings, and the .NET client ignores filters with null values.
  • FIND-14951 – Fixed a PdfDocumentFormatException error that occurred during PDF attachment text extraction due to an outdated PdfPig library version.