Hoping to open up the long tail of its mobile website's content.
The BBC has launched a beta search function on its mobile website homepage, after what executive producer Ulyssa MacMillan describes as a "complex" development process.
The new function lets users search the mobile site for news, sport, radio and television sites, while on devices that support the Beeb's iPlayer, users can also search for TV and radio shows on that.
Users can't search the BBC's dynamic programme schedule, but there is already a separate mobile site for that purpose, explains MacMillan in a blog post.
"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," she writes.
"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."
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For now, users have to manually add the Beeb's search bar to their customised BBC Mobile homepage, but once it's out of beta, it will automatically appear on every user's homepage.




















