[Koha] Anonymous Search History

[Paul A]

On 2018-04-30 11:05 AM, Caroline Cyr-La-Rose wrote:
> Hi All,
> 
> I'm trying to figure out the search_history table in Koha. Are anonymous 
> OPAC searches ever added to that table? 

A word of caution about "anonymous searches" and whether (or not) you 
use a robots.txt file on your server (we limit to just a few search 
engines, and have found ourselves obliged to "deny" at firewall level 
Baidu and a couple of other abusive spiders.)

We still get +/- 300,000 "searches" per day and have written, totally 
separately from Koha, an analytical tool at apache log level. It is 
somewhat useful, but only after massaging the results to eliminate 
google, other "permitted", and "rogue" (do not respect robots.txt but 
are not yet in 'deny') search engines.

I would however strongly encourage your IT team to do something similar. 
The number of abusive WordPress (wp) and .php crack attempts is an 
eye-opener. Won't help your librarians, but is educational for today's 
web. We do *not* record these results in the Koha db, which might well 
get swamped, or worse, DDoS'd.

YMMV.

Best -- Paul



My EnableOpacSearchHistory
> syspref is set to "Keep" and my AnonymousPatron syspref is set to 21. I 
> see in the C4::Search::History that if a user is not logged in, the 
> search history is saved in a cookie. But is it ever saved in the database?
> 
> I'd like to know what words patrons use when they are searching, 
> regardless of if they are logged in or not.
> 
> Thanks!
> 
> Caroline Cyr La Rose, MLIS
> Head of training and support, inLibro
> 
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> 


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