Investigate technical feasability of a search page

[owenatgov]

What

Investigate the technical feasibility of a separate site search as opposed to the current search powered by the accessible autocomplete with a fallback of a link to the site map.

Timebox: 3 days

Why

This follows an initial workshop as part of #4195 where several ideas pointed to a separate search page as a way to make the issue easier to solve. Given that the GOV.UK Design System website is a static site, we'd need to be able to create a static search page, which may not be possible. We generate a json file on build which is used by the site search but we need to access it and generate a whole view.

Another option to consider is the tech docs gem, which has a separate search page which is generated by js. See frontend docs for an example.

Who needs to work on this

Developer

Who needs to review this

Website accessibility squad

Done when

• We've either discovered if this is possible or not OR we've exhausted the timebox
• We've documented our findings

[querkmachine]

My imagining is that the standalone search page would still be a JavaScript enhancement in this context, still falling back to the sitemap in the event that JS is unavailable.

I suppose the major point of failure in that situation is in the user performing a search (e.g.) from the homepage, being directed to the standalone page, where whatever JS renders the results fails to load or initialise properly.

[owenatgov]

Update

Firstly, @querkmachine it took me ages to clock that because we have a static site, we would need to generate search data on load which is obviously impossible without a backend app to serve a page 🤦🏻 Therefore this can only ever be a js enhancement either as a separate search 'view' or an extended version of the header site search, which inherantly makes it an enhancement and potentially more taxing to build.

Secondly, the squad has started to lean away from this option for a couple of reasons:

• Users could potentially rely on the search results only and we want them to use the guidance pages
• A separate search view or larger search section could mean users might have more feature expectations from us i.e filter
• Generally the user need for a bigger search is unclear besides us getting more space to build search results

@hazalarpalikli is going to talk to folks who recently worked on GOV.UK's search and report her findings