The BBC has launched a beta search function on its mobile website homepage, incorporating TV and radio shows on the iPlayer. The tool lets users search the mobile site for news, sport, radio and television sites, while devices that support the iPlayer also allow users to search for TV and radio shows. In a blog […]
The BBC has launched a beta search function on its mobile website homepage, incorporating TV and radio shows on the iPlayer. The tool lets users search the mobile site for news, sport, radio and television sites, while devices that support the iPlayer also allow users to search for TV and radio shows.
In a blog post, BBC executive producer Ulyssa MacMil writes: “We know it’s crucial to get the results right first time on mobile – and taking our website search and making it work to that goal was a complex project. We spent weeks fine tuning the search logic, weighting our search terms, and we now know more about the idiosyncrasies of search logic than we ever thought we would need to.”
During the test phase, users have to manually add the BBC search bar to their customised BBC Mobile homepage, but once it’s out of beta, it will automatically appear on every user’s homepage.
The aggregation tools are being tested on mobile, but we’d expect them to role out across the BBC group to give users a centralised way of searching.
BBC blog
