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mysociety / theyworkforyou

Keeping tabs on the UK's parliaments and assemblies
http://www.theyworkforyou.com/
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Search results for Parliamentary terms, committees and positions #247

Open MyfanwyNixon opened 11 years ago

MyfanwyNixon commented 11 years ago

I think it's intuitive, if you don't fully understand Parliament, to search the site for terms like 'select committee' in an attempt to find out what it is. Currently that just brings you to a page of mentions of the phrase, like this: http://www.theyworkforyou.com/search/?s=select+committee. Similarly, 'department for work and pensions' (http://www.theyworkforyou.com/search/?s=department+for+work+and+pensions).

During the budget, it's known behaviour that users come and search for the phrase 'budget', which does not bring them to the right page.

We could provide explanatory pages, if we are really to serve those who do not fully understand how Parliament works. Crucially, they'd need to be the top search result.

Such pages could contain a brief description of the department/function, a list of everyone within it, and links to their individual pages, with the option to see search results for that phrase coming quite low on the page, as I doubt it is a common desire.

Similarly searches for job titles should bring up the person currently holding that position, eg "secretary of state for education" could just take you to Michael Gove's page.

I guess this is also a way of saying that #62 could not only provide data for individual representatives' pages, but could also be used to create pages where the information is sliced in a different way.

MyfanwyNixon commented 10 years ago

Quick note that it'd make sense to put 'Parliament is in recess' on the homepage at the relevant times - otherwise the less-informed user might wonder why the recent debates are so dated.

dracos commented 10 years ago

That really deserves a separate ticket from this one? :) Anyway, it used to display recess information on the front page, I'm not sure when that was lost (also https://github.com/mysociety/theyworkforyou/blob/master/www/includes/easyparliament/recess.php is out of date, but that's currently only used to grey out parts of the calendars).

MyfanwyNixon commented 10 years ago

OK, I'll start a new ticket.

MyfanwyNixon commented 7 years ago

This one probably should have been included as a JRCT contender @JenMysoc

MyfanwyNixon commented 7 years ago

See also https://github.com/mysociety/theyworkforyou/issues/1292