Search engine using several parameters in the URL

Hi all,

Beside of the displayed “List of keywords” extracted from the URL’s parameters for the various search engines, my Piwik report also lists localized versions of the usual search engines in the list of normal websites. In my case, it is google.fr, whereas it IS included in the file “/core/DataFiles/SearchEngines.php”.

The problem seems to be that the french google URLs include many other parameters than the search term(s), the search terms themselves appearing somewhere inbetween other parameters, like this:

www.google.fr/search?client=firefox-a&rls=org.mozilla%3Afr%3Aofficial&channel=s&hl=fr&source=hp&q=comment+se+souvenir&meta=&btnG=Recherche+Google

In this example, the string “comment se souvenir” is not included by Piwik in the keyword list and the URL is listed among the normal websites.

My questions are:

  • Is this a normal behaviour?
  • Is there any way to include these items back into the list of keywords?

Thanks in advance,
(And thanks for that great web analysis tool!)

Nicochto

I’m fairly certain that Piwik parses this out even if it (‘q’) isn’t the first parameter in the query string.

What version of Piwik are you running?

Is this an actual referer string that didn’t get parsed?

can you find the referer_url in your piwik_log_visit table that didn’t get parsed properly as a search engine? (ie. it wouldn’t have a referer_keyword or referer_name in this table

Hi folks,

Thanks for your answers. I did check in the piwik_log_visit table and indeed, the searches on google.fr were not parsed properly as a search engine, whereas all other google searches (.com, .be, .ch, .hu etc.) were properly parsed.

The problem seems to have disappeared since the 0.5.1 update (I was running the 0.4.5 before that). So for now, there is no problem anymore… Did you change anything in the SearchEngines.php file?

My question is now, how to get the older search engine logs (prior to the 0.5.1 update) back into the search engine/keyword lists and not in the external website list…?

Thanks a lot!

Nicochto

PS: as attached file, an excerpt of my piwik_log_visit table showing various searches on Dec 10th, as the problem still existed. The displayed columns are, from left to right: “referer_type”, “referer_name”, “referer_url” and “referer_keyword”