Cycle 2024.2: technical search improvements

[larsyencken]

Goal

Improve the quality of search results returned by our existing search, as exposed on our homepage and in the site header.

Scope

Must do

• owid/ops#158
• Discover: add explorer views into search index #3332
• Verify that all relevant Algolia settings are in code
• Search clicks for charts and explorers aren't being tracked properly #2932
• Develop a dev measure for search quality #3378
• Log custom search clickthrough data to BigQuery #3402
• Implement new designs for explorer views in search results #3416
• Detect and dynamically thumbnail geographical entities feat(search): match geographic entities in search #3388
  • Overhaul availableEntities indexing #3401
• Experiment with low-hanging search improvements #3377
• feat(search): surface explorer views in search results #3429
• Feature branch PR: Cycle 2022.2 search improvements: explorer views & entity matching #3497

Should do

• Staging servers do not have functioning search #3380
• Use thumbnail placeholders in search UI enhance(search): show placeholder panels for chart thumbnails #3371
• Index our content with Algolia at deploy time #2852

Not this cycle

• Include headings, key insights, SDG targets etc. in search index posts
• Add additional page types to the search index #3383
• Show thumbnails for articles in results page #3442
• Get pageviews for all explorer views for ranking
• Make a standout data search result an interactive chart
• Power user filters for search
• Improve how search results are tagged in the output
• Replace country pages with search results
• Add data-specific filters to the search results
• Improve the layout of data search results

[larsyencken]

/cc @samizdatco @ikesau

[samizdatco]

I added some comments to today's meeting notes and the search project page with additional context for prioritizing some of the must-do and should-do items