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Why are the number of search requests shown in the Billing and Analytics pages different when not using search-as-you-type?

  • Updated

You may notice that you see different values for the number of search requests when comparing your Billing and Analytics data. The most common explanation for this is how as-you-type searches are measured, but if you're not using this method here are some other explanations.

If you use Algolia to build your category pages by applying filters, each time a category page loads, a query is sent with the relevant filter parameters applied - these are called browse requests.

Billing Dashboard

The number of search requests seen in your Billing Dashboard corresponds to the total sum of all browse and search requests for the given time period.

Analytics Dashboard

The figure you see in your Analytics dashboard is an aggregation of the queries made as users navigate through a category.

The aggregation is the way in which the engine figures out a "search session" from the series of queries being sent with each new page load as users navigate the category pages.

A new query is sent each time:

  • a user navigates to a category page and applies additional filters. This generates a new set of results and so a query with the new filter parameters is sent.
  • a user navigates to the next page of hits. This sets a new offset value which is sent in a new query.

Using offset Value to determine Search Session

The offset value indicates the starting point for each query's results ie. which page the user is on. For example, if a user is searching through pages of comedy film titles where the applied filter is genre:comedy, each subsequent query (new page) will have an increased offset value to retrieve the next set of records that apply to those filters (genre:comedy). For example

  • the first page has an offset:0
  • the second page has an offset:10
  • the third has an offset:20, and so on

If the queries share the same filters and userToken but have different offset values, they are seen as requests to retrieve different pages for the same filtered results and are aggregated in the analytics data, since they are considered part of the same search session (ie. were part of a paginated search process).

The value you see in your Analytics dashboard therefore corresponds to the number of "search sessions".

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