Collection ID requirement in STAC search API

[777arc]

This announcement is related to the Planetary Computer API, which allows users to search for the data they need across space and time. On Oct 29, 2024, we made a temporary change that will now require any STAC searches (a GET or POST to the /search endpoint) to specify a collection ID, either in the body of a POST, the query params of a GET, or within a filter (e.g., "args": [{"property": "collection"}, your_collection_id]) [1].

If using the Python API, the collection ID is specified as shown in [2]. Even though the STAC API spec does not require a collection ID to be specified, the Planetary Computer contains hundreds of collections across PBs of data. Searches that don't specify a collection ID are expensive and can result in performance issues.

In the near future, we plan to add back the ability to do a search without collection ID specified to be compliant with STAC API specification.

[1] microsoft/planetary-computer-apis#240
[2] https://planetarycomputer.microsoft.com/docs/quickstarts/reading-stac#Searching

-Marc