Country name site search improvements

[larsyencken]

We aren't indexing country profiles (currently for CO2, Covid, and Energy) in Algolia, so users have no way of finding them.

This probably requires a new section in our search, so that typing "Energy" doesn't make half the results country profiles for random countries.

We also should make it so that if you type a country name, Grapher charts that return are preconfigured with that country name as their selected entity (we could use CF Workers to generate the preview thumbnail now 🙌) / ✅ Done in #3483

[larsyencken]

/cc @ikesau

[ikesau]

Due to the highly templated nature of country profiles, we may want to see if there's a different way to think about surfacing them in search.

i.e. it won't be helpful to have 180 results when you type "Energy", but maybe if you type a recognizable country name, we could add a custom section for country profiles.

I've started a discussion on Slack to see how others are feeling about this.

[larsyencken]

Just to give a fuller picture, I did an analysis of all the things that are in our sitemap but missing from Algolia:

https://gist.github.com/larsyencken/1fcd4e026a4b67b157263f2ae1366a1d

The list seems to contain:

• Country profiles (vanilla, co2, energy, covid)
• Sanitation explorer experiment for SEO testing
• A bunch of grapher charts, not sure why
• A bunch of redirects and announcement links

[marcelgerber]

• A bunch of grapher charts, not sure why

Haven't checked these, but if a chart is fully untagged, or only tagged with "private" tags like core-econ, then it will not get indexed to Algolia.

It probably also shouldn't go into the sitemap then, but it probably get included anyways.

[ikesau]

Thanks for that, Lars!

I think of the classes of omissions that you listed, country profiles are the only ones we actually want to handle, and they probably require some sort of special treatment.

I'm going to update this ticket to reflect that.

[github-actions]

This issue has had no activity within 10 months. It is considered stale and will be closed in 7 days unless it is worked on or tagged as pinned.

[marcelgerber]

We also should make it so that if you type a country name, Grapher charts that return are preconfigured with that country name as their selected entity (we could use CF Workers to generate the preview thumbnail now 🙌)

This is done now, see #3483