Query Analytics: International Characters Fixed, Popular Queries Shows Real Searches

Query Analytics is only useful if it shows you what your visitors really searched for. Two long-standing distortions are gone: garbled international characters, and a Popular Queries chart crowded with filter clicks instead of actual searches.

01 International characters, recorded correctly

Queries containing accented or non-Latin characters could be captured with broken encoding, so a perfectly normal search showed up as mojibake in Latest Queries and Popular Queries. Query text is now handled as UTF-8 end to end, in every language.

02 Popular Queries shows what people actually searched

Clicking a facet or a filter is browsing, not searching — but those clicks used to be counted as queries. On many indexes the Popular Queries chart filled up with bare filter values (years, category names) while the searches visitors typed were pushed out entirely. On top of that, a popularity threshold hid any query seen fewer than five times, which on a quiet day meant nearly all of them.

Both are fixed. Filter-only requests are now counted as browse activity, and every real query appears in the chart and the data table, even if it was typed once.

03 More query syntaxes recognized

Analytics also captures more of the ways a query can reach your index. Search text embedded inline in advanced Solr syntax — for example a query written inside local parameters rather than as a plain q value — is now extracted and reported like any other search, in Latest Queries and Popular Queries alike.