The development of BBC Search has been a priority for the Digital team over the past year.Senior Product Manager John Barratt explains the thinking behind a new feature called Search Cards, alongside future plans for the team.
What is a Search Card?
Over the past ten days when you searched for a TV programme, you would have seen ‘cards’ displayed at the top of the page for up to three episodes that you can watch on iPlayer.
Cards allow us to field certain types of search queries and present the results in a way that best satisfies their search ‘intent’.
For instance, when someone searches for a programme title, most want to watch or listen to that programme right then and there. Cards get them to the available content faster than our ‘organic’ results.
Our ‘organic’ (default) search results point to URLs on /programmes, as these are the permanent reference pages for those programmes. They contain additional data and content such as cast lists, music tracks, and clips. They also, of course, point to iPlayer pages when the programme is available to watch. So by introducing Programme Cards that point directly to the iPlayer pages, we’re cutting out at least one click for the vast majority of search use cases.
Cards get people to the available programmes more quickly
Why does it look different to the other results?
The design of the cards themselves allows users to start to ‘peek inside’ the content they link to and start to make smarter decisions on whether they want to go to that programme. Over time we’ll add more information such as a synopsis to better inform your choices.
Small Steps
We’ve started small. To begin with, we show up to three cards - only for video content and on desktop devices.
Soon the cards will appear on mobile and tablet devices, along with audio content and the maximum number of cards shown will increase from three. Finally, we’ll relax the rules on when a card shows so a misspelt or partially entered query will return a card, not just on a “100% match”.
By taking this incremental approach, we’re able to release features more frequently and retain greater control on the load applied to the new service, ensuring it can cope at every stage.
Future Cards
The scope of the content we could place in cards is fairly large. High on our list however, is UK place cards. Around 10% of searches are for towns, cities and postcodes and a ‘Place‘ card could bring together news, sport, weather and travel results for that area, with at least one of these topics satisfying the person’s main intent.
We’ll also be looking at food-related cards. Many people search for individual foods such as banana, apple etc. By bringing together recipes, news items and cookery programmes that feature that food, we should be able to answer a person’s query and allow them to explore more related content from the rest of bbc.co.uk.
What’s Next for Search?
The next few months will see us migrate the Welsh language search over to the current search engine and design. We’ll be improving the design of Search Suggest by bringing in more data around episodes and series.
Finally we’ll bring in the ability to apply a date filter to results, so people can refine their queries further and get to the results they want.
