Popular search keywords not being tracked

Question

I am using Sitecore 9.3 and trying to track and display the popular search terms used on the website. However, I am not seeing the search keywords being tracked as intended in Internal search dashboard. Any ideas on what I am missing here?

        public static void TrackSearch(string searchTerm)
        {
            if (Tracker.Current != null && Tracker.Current.IsActive)
            {
                var pageEventData = new PageEventData("Search", new Guid(Constants.Items.SystemSearchEvent))
                {
                    ItemId = new Guid(Constants.Items.Search),
                    Data = searchTerm,
                    DataKey = searchTerm,
                    Text = searchTerm
                };
                var interaction = Tracker.Current.Session.Interaction;
                if (interaction != null)
                {
                    interaction.CurrentPage.Register(pageEventData);
                }
            }
        }

Constants.Items.SystemSearchEvent is the guid corresponding to /sitecore/system/Settings/Analytics/Page Events/Search

I am not seeing anything getting tracked here, even though the above code is getting executed successfully, and there are no errors in the logs file.

I am trying to use the following code to fetch the tracked searches, but it is not returning anything, since nothing seems to be getting tracked:

        public static List<string> GetTopSearchQueries()
        {
            try
            {
                var reportingService = ApiContainer.Repositories.GetReportingService();
                var reportQuery = GetReportQuery();
                ReportResponse reportResponse = reportingService.RunQuery(reportQuery);
                var encoder = ApiContainer.GetReportResponseEncoder();
                var result = encoder.Encode(reportResponse);
                if (result != null && result.Data != null && result.Data.Localization != null
                    && result.Data.Localization.Fields != null && result.Data.Localization.Fields.Any())
                {
                    var searchFields = result.Data.Localization.Fields.FirstOrDefault();
                    if (searchFields != null)
                    {
                        return result.Data.Localization.Fields.FirstOrDefault()
                            ?.Translations.Select(r => r.Value).ToList();
                    }
                }
            }
            catch (Exception ex)
            {
                Log.Info(ex.Message, ex);
            }

            return new List<string>();
        }

Answer 1

We have done this using PageEvents by passing the search query as parameter. Here is the code that works and registers the search events

public static bool TriggerSearchEventByQuery(string query)
    {
        if (!Tracker.IsActive)
        {
            Tracker.StartTracking();
        }

        if (!Tracker.IsActive || Tracker.Current.CurrentPage == null)
        {
            Sitecore.Diagnostics.Log.Warn($"Tracker current page is null", "xDBHelper");
            return false;
        }
        try
        {
            var searchEvent = Tracker.MarketingDefinitions.PageEvents[AnalyticsIds.SearchEvent.Guid];
            if (searchEvent == null)
            {
                Sitecore.Diagnostics.Log.Warn($"Search event not found", "xDBHelper");
                return false;
            }
            Tracker.Current.CurrentPage.Register(new PageEventData(searchEvent.Alias, searchEvent.Id)
            {
                Data = query
            });
            return true;
        }
        catch (Exception ex)
        {
            Sitecore.Diagnostics.Log.Warn($"Failed to trigger search event: {ex}", "xDBHelper");
        }
        return false;
    }

Hope this helps!