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The official website for the Ubuntu operating system
https://ubuntu.com
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Add search results to the 404 page? #4481

Open nottrobin opened 5 years ago

nottrobin commented 5 years ago

Following on from https://github.com/canonical-webteam/practices/issues/127, should we add some search results to augment the 404 page?

We should still make sure the page is clearly a 404 page, and that we don't make search the "point" of the page in any sense.

Greggless commented 5 years ago

Here's a couple wireframes for how it might work.

With search results

image

with 0 search results

image

nottrobin commented 5 years ago

I like those @Greggless. Although it's a real shame that "cluod" doesn't return better search results ;). Search results work beautifully for www.ubuntu.com/openstak - why not use that? :stuck_out_tongue:

My only thought is - might you still want to show some other options alongside search results? Like the homepage, the downloads page or contact us? Or do you think they're well covered by the existing navigation?

Greggless commented 5 years ago

That would be handy, too.

We could use the "still no luck" section from the 0 search results to redirect people to the homepage.

Depending how clever the search can be (and how much work it is to implement) we can suggest relevant pages from misspelled items kubernates --> kubernetes.

nottrobin commented 5 years ago

@Greggless Oooooh look! I can add "synonyms" in the custom search console. Now "cluod" and "kubernates" both work!

https://www.ubuntu.com/search?q=cluod https://www.ubuntu.com/search?q=kubernates

Let me know if you think of any others =)

nottrobin commented 5 years ago

I think we can also make use of Google spelling corrections, possibly, but it's extra work: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/40260655/does-google-allow-businesses-to-use-did-you-mean-feature-as-an-api-i-would-l

Greggless commented 5 years ago

Terminator T100 --> AI / ML

image

That's great, thanks Robin!

Will all misspellings have to be coded indivdually or is there some magic that can make judgements?

nottrobin commented 5 years ago

I think we might be able to support standard spelling corrections, but it's some extra work.

carkod commented 1 year ago

I think this could increase spamming of search. Because anything could go to 404

nottrobin commented 1 year ago

@carkod why is that? The search page is readily available, anyone who wants to spam it can find it. I wouldn't assume that's a reason not to do this work until we have reason to believe it might be. And anyway, we still have a few ideas in our back pocket for tackling search spam, I believe.

petesfrench commented 7 months ago

@juanruitina Do you have any opinions on this from a UX perspective?

juanruitina commented 7 months ago

It's a good suggestion for improving 404 pages, although it would require a bit more work on the details. For instance, we might not need to show an error message for no results, given the user hasn't made any search. I'm sure @Sophie-32 will have some opinions on this too. Shall we add this to our backlog?