Site search improvements: quick wins
We’ve made quite a few improvements and fixes to the GOV.UK search engine this year, even though our main focus has been on improving navigation and how content is organised.
Tara Stockford
New tool to see trending searches
We’ve set up a trending searches dashboard to show search terms that people are looking for more than usual in GOV.UK site search. This can help you to spot emerging or rising user needs and react quickly to make sure …
Testing scoped search on GOV.UK
As we transition more organisations and their related content onto GOV.UK we increase the likelihood of returning lower quality results to our users. This blog post outlines one approach we are looking at called scoped search, or automatic filtering, to …
How GOV.UK site search works
The information in this blogpost may now be out of date. See the current GOV.UK content and publishing guidance. We’re often asked, ‘how does search work?’ Site search is quite a big topic, but what people usually want to know …
Search engines: what happens when your content moves
We’re hearing some concerns about how moving to GOV.UK will affect your visibility in search engines. In fact, we think many organisations are likely to benefit from the strength of the single government domain. GOV.UK’s status as a large, authoritative …
GOV.UK one year on: twice as many visits
A few weeks ago, GOV.UK had more than 2 million visits in one day for the first time, on Monday 30 September. It wasn’t long before we reached another milestone, with more than 10 million visits in one week from …
GOV.UK one year on: 1 in 5 visits is from a mobile
GOV.UK celebrates its first birthday on Thursday. We'll be writing about some of the most interesting data we've seen this year in the run-up. 1 in 5 visits to GOV.UK are made on a mobile phone - that’s a third …
Do people read your emails?
Like a lot of teams working in government departments, we send round regular update emails to a large group. Often, we don't hear anything back. Is this because people aren't interested, or because we're giving them all the information they …
Heatwave: too hot to work?
Last week, Peter Jordan looked at how the warm weather and other external events affected traffic to GOV.UK. With temperatures getting hotter and hotter, what was the effect on our heat-related content?
Related content and links
Act now to comply with new accessibility regulations
New regulations mean public sector bodies have a legal duty to make websites and apps accessible. Service and product owners for central government’s website, GOV.UK, need to upload an accessibility page and publishers need to upload an accessible documents policy.
Find out how your public sector organisation is impacted at GOV.UK/accessibility-regulations.