Make the invalid search input page more helpful

[robredpath]

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe. Right now, if I enter an invalid search term, the error that I see isn't very helpful.

It's not clear that it's a syntactic error (rather than that my search has no results), and doesn't really help me - especially as the suggested solutions probably aren't helpful here.

Describe the solution you'd like

I think it would be useful to provide a link to the search bar help, and provide suggestions that are related to the likely errors that the user has made:

• Unclosed quotes - such as "cats
• Unmatched quotes - "cats'
• Operators in the wrong place = ca~ts
• Copy-paste errors resulting in one of the above

Describe alternatives you've considered

We could try to "do the right thing" in lots of these cases, but I think that adds a lot of complexity and I'd rather show users their mistakes.

Additional context

[mariongalley]

• I think it would be useful to provide a link to the search bar help

  • Agreed

• and provide suggestions that are related to the likely errors that the user has made

  • Yeah that list looks good! Do we have any evidence to support our assumptions about what the most common syntax errors e.g. analytics?

• We could try to "do the right thing" in lots of these cases, but I think that adds a lot of complexity and I'd rather show users their mistakes.

  • Agree, I think when someone has spent time writing a query using operators and quotes etc. they're either fairly technical or were following our instructions, so it would be frustrating to be shown results that are a bit of a guess as to what they were trying to do rather than given a chance to fix the syntax and get exact results.

[robredpath]

Do we have any evidence to support our assumptions about what the most common syntax errors e.g. analytics?

It's quite hard to trigger this error. The one time I've seen it done was an advanced user who had misinterpreted (the ambiguous, but now updated) documentation around the ~ operator, and was trying to use it in the middle of a word, which isn't valid.

I've had a trawl through the analytics, and most things that I thought might trigger this, don't. The only example I've found in the last month's searches was someone searching for terms along the lines of 124356/A/78/B, which look like someone's IDs. Wrapping the term in double quotes fixes the error, so we should add that to the list.

Unmatched brackets are another one to add to the list. Someone tried to search for Fictional Foundation ( (probably a copy-paste error) and saw this page. They clearly weren't too phased, because 7 seconds later they repeated their search without the erroneous (. But, not everyone will necessarily see their mistake like that!

[mariongalley]

Brilliant, that's really useful information, and thanks for looking at the analytics!

I think if it's a very rare occurrence then we don't need to spend too much more time designing the perfect page, I'd suggest we implement the solution you described above at some point in the iterative improvements. Maybe we can check back in a few months whether any more invalid searches were run, but hopefully it stays very low.

[BibianaC]

Make the invalid search input page more helpful