I did some analysis on the search requests data @Farouq Oyebiyi shared last month. Here's a recap. I don't think any immediate action is needed, but this provides guidance on future search UX improvements.

Research questions:

  1. What percent of requests come from the pill prompts* on the homepage?

    1. *28% of unique requests (same IP+same day+same keyword) came from the pill prompts. The great majority, 72% of unique requests, were self-initiated**.*

  2. Which pill prompts* are most popular?

    1. *The top 5 are labeled here. It's worth noting that the 2 most popular (Tinubu and Independence Day) are also the first two provided on the home page, so users may have simply clicked on the first thing they saw.*

  3. What percent of searches result in looking at multiple pages of results? I.e. using the navigation at the bottom of the search results to move to the next page of search results.

    1. *45%. This is much higher than I expected. People are digging deep!*

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  4. Which self-initiated searches are most popular?

    1. *Sorted here by count. I've also listed collection ideas based on the most popular requests. Politicians, military leaders, civil war, and independence are the biggest ones + Fela.*

  5. What percent of self-initiated searches are for dates?

    1. *10% of searches include a date.*
      1. This is a problem because the keyword search algorithm doesn't seem to incorporate the publishing date. Using a date or year as a keyword seems more intuitive for some people than using the little calendar filter.
      2. People have also been searching for years outside our range.

  6. What percent of self-initiated searches include the publisher name?

    1. *1% of searches include a publisher name. It's a small number, but we should consider including the publisher attribute in the search attributes or as a filter.*

*Pill prompts refer to the keywords presented as pills on the homepage (homepage only, not the automatically generated ones on the newspaper pages).

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**Self-initiated means the user didn't use the pill prompts on the homepage.