Respond to user search events

[StarfallProjects]

I'm setting up Plausible Analytics in our docs. I'd like to use their Events API to track search queries and results. Ideally, I'd log an event in Plausible at two points:

• When a user enters a search term (this would log what they searched and the results they got)
• When a user clicks on a result (this would log what they searched and the page they chose)

Has anyone done similar? I'm particularly stumped on the first one, as the user doesn't have to click anything to search (results appear as they type), so I'm not sure what I could hook into that signals they're done writing their query.

[squidfunk]

Search is your friend 😊

• Add support for Plausible Analytics #4847
• Capture search terms with Plausible.io #5063

Has anyone done similar? I'm particularly stumped on the first one, as the user doesn't have to click anything to search (results appear as they type), so I'm not sure what I could hook into that signals they're done writing their query.

Material for MkDocs uses the blur event to capture the semantics of "finished typing". Not perfect, but works reasonably well.

mkdocs-material/src/partials/integrations/analytics/google.html

Lines 42 to 49 in c2e5558

	/* Set up search tracking */
	if (document.forms.search) {
	var query = document.forms.search.query
	query.addEventListener("blur", function() {
	if (this.value)
	gtag("event", "search", { search_term: this.value })
	})
	}