Searches
What people typed into a site’s search box, counted off the access log.
rainlytics searches --path /search/ --last 30dterm searches redirected-------- -------- ----------好 41 38happy 12 0What readers search for says which pages to write next, and a site usually has no record of it. The
terms are in the access log already. CloudFront records cs-uri-query whatever the cache key and
origin forwarding are set to, so a search answered from the edge is counted alongside one that
reached the origin. No other source covers both.
Who searched stays out of the answer. The delivered field set carries the viewer’s address, because the unique visitor count is hashed from it, and a search count reads the query string alone. Cookies are left out of the field set altogether. The log table page covers the address column.
Name the search page
Section titled “Name the search page”--path is what separates a search from every other query string the same log holds. A site’s
analytics beacon, its legacy tools and the tracking parameters on inbound links are all in there,
and counting them together answers nothing.
rainlytics searches --path /search/ --last 30drainlytics searches --path /tools/convert/ --param hanzi --last 30dA site with two search boxes gives --path once for each, and every row names the box it came from:
rainlytics searches --path /words/search/ --path /sentences/search/ --last 30dterm section searches redirected-------- ------------------ -------- ----------happy /words/search/ 41 38happy /sentences/search/ 12 0Two corpora give two answers to the same word. The section column names the box a row came from,
written out of the same test that let the row in. Where two of the prefixes overlap (/guides/
given alongside /guides/advanced/) a row reports the first of them given, and every row is in
exactly one section.
One --path leaves the column out, since every row would carry the same value. One run still reads
both boxes for one query’s money, where two runs would be two questions and two bills.
--param names the parameter carrying the term and defaults to q. One site can hold several, and
each is its own question. --redirect-status names what counts as a search sent to its answer, and
the section below covers it. Everything else the rollups take works here
too, --host, --limit and --include-bots among them. See rollups.
redirected is how many found a page
Section titled “redirected is how many found a page”A site that answers an exact match by sending the reader straight to its page can read that column as the searches that found one. The rest produced a list.
term searches redirected-------- -------- ----------好 41 38happy 12 0好 is a word the site publishes, and nearly every search for it goes straight there. Nobody
searching happy was sent anywhere, so those twelve readers got a list.
Which statuses count
Section titled “Which statuses count”302, 303 and 307. Those are what a site answers when it sends a reader to the thing they searched for.
301 and 308 are left out, because a permanent redirect is address tidying. A reader gets one
whatever they typed. A site answering /search?q=happy with a 308 to /search/?q=happy carries the
term on the redirect and again on the request behind it, and counting the 308 reports one reader as
two searches and puts happy on the same line as a term the site publishes a page for. A
canonical-host 301 does it again.
A site whose exact match answers 301 names its own:
rainlytics searches --path /search/ --redirect-status 301,302 --last 30dOne value carrying commas, where --path is given again for each path. A path is long and arrives
one at a time, often out of a shell variable. Three status codes are read and typed as one thing.
An empty result reads as a list
Section titled “An empty result reads as a list”What the access log cannot tell you is whether that list had anything in it. The record carries the status, the path and the query, and a ranked list and an empty result are both 200. Separating them is work for the site being measured, which has to make the two differ in one of those three fields before any log-based report can pick them apart. A distinct status for an empty result is the usual lever.
The term is decoded once
Section titled “The term is decoded once”CloudFront percent-encodes what it writes and the browser has already encoded the term, so 家
reaches the log as %25E5%25AE%25B6. The rollup reads it with url_extract_parameter, which
decodes its own answer, and one further url_decode finishes the job.
That is one pass where pageviews needs two, and the
difference is the extract function rather than the data. Two passes here would decode a term
holding a percent sequence twice, and 50% typed into a search box is the case.
A space arrives as + from a form and as %20 from a hand-written link, and both come back as a
space. The two spellings of one search are one row.