The government’s new Digital Marketplace platform is meeting its aim of improving ability to search products, according to initial data.

The Government Digital Service turned off the marketplace’s predecessor, CloudStore on October 14.

And the unit says data from one week’s worth of data from each platform indicates that visitors to the site are finding it easier to find what they want.

Gemma Phelan, technical architect at GDS said in a blog posting today: “Digital Marketplace has been designed to facilitate search, and 55% of people used keywords to search, as opposed to 29% on CloudStore.

“And there are other indications that people are searching as we intended.

“Only 14% exit immediately after searching (down from 24% on CloudStore), which suggests fewer people are giving up.”

In addition, the number of users leaving after viewing just the homepage was only 13% compared to 32% on Cloudstore.

She added that the data also showed an increase in people conducting more than one search as well as phrases with three or more words.

However, she cautioned that it is difficult to draw definitive conclusions from just one week’s data, and that further analysis will be needed to find out whether people are getting useful results from their searches.

Phelan quoted one anonymous user who had reported: “On the other side, here’s a positive comment from one of our users: “I’ve just run the same search (accessibility testing) on both the CloudStore and the Marketplace and I’ve found the Marketplace to be infinitely less confusing.

“My results were much more closely matched to my search and did not seem to rely on me understanding the difference between the various types of service.”