# Meilisearch v1.44.0 — Release & Upgrade Intelligence
- **Product:** Meilisearch (https://meilisearch.com)
- **Version:** v1.44.0
- **Released:** May 18, 2026
- **Impact Score:** 7/10
- **Breaking Changes:** Source flagged
- **Canonical Analysis:** https://changelogs.us/meilisearch/updates/v1.44.0/

## Executive Summary (TL;DR)
Meilisearch v1.44.0. Source highlight: Meilisearch v1.44.0 adds remote federated facet search, indexing performance improvements, and other improvements and bugfixes. It also contains a couple of breaking changes, detailed below.

## Breaking Changes & Deprecations
- Meilisearch v1.44.0 adds remote federated facet search, indexing performance improvements, and other improvements and bugfixes. It also contains a couple of breaking changes, detailed below.
- Breaking changes - When using the `network` experimental feature, with sharding enabled (`leader` is not `null` in the network configuration), `POST /indexes/{indexUid}/facet-search` calls now default to a remote federated facet search, fetching and merging results from all shards in the network.

## New Features
- When using the `network` experimental feature, with sharding enabled (`leader` is not `null` in the network configuration), `POST /indexes/{indexUid}/facet-search` calls now default to a remote federated facet search, fetching and merging results from all shards in the network.
- If you are using the `network` experimental feature and have a `leader` defined for your network, **remote calls are now the default** for calls to `POST /indexes/{indexUid}/facet-search`
- Add query to federated search metadata
- Remove issue template for feature issues

## Improvements
- Improve the documentation of the health route

## Bug Fixes
- The timeout for calling an external REST embedder at search time is now tied to the `searchCutOffMs` defined in the index, rather than fixed.
- Settings changes performed via a settings subroute (**not** the "all settings" route) are now correctly propagated to other remotes on the network. By @dureuill in https://github.com/meilisearch/meilisearch/pull/6380
- The chat route no longer fails in some condition when using Mistral as a provider. By @renezander030 in https://github.com/meilisearch/meilisearch/pull/6327
- Prevent accidentally renaming a remote when modifying the network configuration. By @dureuill in https://github.com/meilisearch/meilisearch/pull/6370