During a pandemic, search results that bury COVID are not a minor inconvenience.
At the height of the pandemic, if you searched for "cough" on NHS.uk, COVID-19 appeared somewhere near the bottom of page four, or the top of page five, depending on the day of the week and the time of day. Meanwhile, people were coming in from Google, not finding what they needed, going back out to Google, and coming back in again. In a public health emergency, that's not an inconvenience. It's dangerous.
The problem
Google as a navigation method. For the NHS website. During a pandemic.
NHS.uk is one of the most visited websites in the country. During the pandemic, the volume of people trying to find accurate, reliable health information was unlike anything seen before, and misinformation was everywhere. The last thing you want is for people to bounce back out to Google to find answers.
The existing search wasn't returning relevant results. Accuracy sat at around 30 to 60 percent. For a site people rely on to make decisions about their health, that number is somewhere between embarrassing and genuinely harmful.
They needed a new search engine, and they needed it configured properly, not just switched on.
The work
Implement it. Then make it work in the real world.
The search platform that won the contract was Algolia. Not all search vendors are worth the trouble; this one is. Good product, good people. The implementation went well.
The harder part was operationalisation: making sure the search engine didn't just work at launch but kept working as the pandemic evolved, as new variants emerged, as the information landscape shifted underneath it. Search needs tending. It doesn't maintain itself.
One of the more remarkable things about working deeply in search data is what it shows you before anyone else is paying attention. Being inside the data during that period meant being able to see regional outbreaks of norovirus and measles forming in the search patterns, and seeing the Omicron variant emerging about two weeks before it became widely known.
Search accuracy went from 30 to 60 percent up to around 95 percent.
People stopped using Google as the navigation method for the NHS website. During a period when health misinformation was rife, that mattered.
Sound familiar?
If your visitors are going back to Google to navigate your website, your search is broken.
It doesn't have to be a pandemic for this to matter. Every time a visitor leaves your platform to find something they should have been able to find on it, you've lost them. The diagnostic will tell you where the problem is and what it's costing you.
Book the diagnostic