What are status:public searches?

One of our trending search terms on our forum is status:public with no CTR.

What do these searches mean, and why are they happening?

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Sorry for the delayed reply to this. Entries in your Trending Search Terms report that have their term set to status:public can be created if a user selects this search filter on the search form:

If they then click the “Search” button without entering any additional terms, a search entry will be created with its term set to status:public.

Another way the entry could be generated would be if users were clicking on a link that had that filter set, but no other search terms. For example, clicking this link will generate a search log entry with its term set to status:public: https://meta.discourse.org/search?expanded=true&q=status%3Apublic.

Is it possible that you have a link in that form somewhere on the internet that users could be clicking?

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As far as we are aware, there is no link on the internet with this. We have searched and have also found nothing.

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In a similar vein, Meta has this as one of its top searches:

Not sure if that helps narrow anything down?

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Just guessing, are there any theme components that use the search endpoint to get a list of topics to display? Or perhaps there is another website embedding a list of public topics and it’s using that endpoint to get the list?

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No theme components and no website that we are aware of. It’s very possible there is an endpoint somewhere out there causing these searches, but we have searched and found nothing.

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