Feather Pulse: Mar 3-9 - Relevance reranker & improved full-text search

Feather Weekly Update - March 3-9, 2026

Welcome to the Feather Pulse! This week we upgraded citation reranker, added §7216 compliance messaging, sped up full-text search, and shipped bug fixes from citation boundaries to chat folder deletion. Here's what landed.

---

Relevance Reranker

Enhanced reranking for site search: Building on our previous temporal awareness improvements, we've upgraded the reranking layer to make resource retrieval even smarter. Now, when Feather surfaces sources, the system doesn't just reorder candidates for content fit—it also weighs recency and context, so the citations shown alongside your answers reflect both topical and temporal relevance to your query.

---

§7216 Compliance Messaging

Feather takes §7216 compliance seriously to protect taxpayer information. We make it simple for CPAs and tax professionals to understand our safeguards—learn more about how we securely handle your clients' data by visiting our Security & Compliance page.

---

Under the Hood

Faster full-text search: We've introduced a precomputed lexeme column for all Tax sources, accelerating keyword-based Tax Knowledge retrieval by eliminating the need for on-the-fly computation.

---

Bug Fixes

• No more mid-word splits: A bug was causing citation markers to land in the middle of words, producing broken-looking output. Citations now appear cleanly at word boundaries.
• AI stability: Fixed edge cases around stopWhen conditions and Feather guards that could cause the agent to exit too early during long research sessions.
• Duplicate file uploads: Files uploaded during a chat that match an existing file now correctly land in the chat folder instead of the root.
• Chat folder deletion: Fixed an internal error that could occur when deleting a chat folder that still contained files from the Safe.

---

That's all for this week's Feather update.

Take care!