Re: Feed / Tag Cloud of Recent Searches from Super Search

[jrtayloriv]

I've been giving this tag cloud thing more thought, and I'm realizing that it's not only quite difficult to implement, but it's not really necessary anyway. It wasn't a very well thought out idea on my part. I should have thought it out more beforehand -- it's not very realistic.

The only reason I found it desirable in the first place, was to show "the most popular search terms for the day, week, month". Why do we need "tag clouds" to do this? I'm pretty sure now that we don't. Why not just have a sorted list?

But even then you've got problems. How do you determine which ones are the most popular? "RDBMS", "databases", "mysql", "postgresql" are all the same topic, and it would make sense to group them together when determining that databases were a popular search term today. But I don't have any idea how to teach the newfangled "popularity machine" how to understand this. As you said, this is starting to cross over into the land of NLP, and I can't come up with a solution myself -- I just don't have the experience or know-how to do such things.

But I still think that the search history feed would be a useful feature, and it is much simpler to design and implement, and won't require a full time staff of linguists and AI experts to maintain ... and I really would enjoy watching the recent searches in a nodelet.

--jrtayloriv

UPDATE: I'm not saying the "tag cloud"/"popular searches" feature is not possible, by the way, just that I don't have any idea how to accomplish it, and that it would probably be better to get the search history feed up and running first, and then worry about more complex functionality built on top of it. If someone else sees a good way to do it, please share it.

[chiggsy]

I'd say the fact that you have no idea how to accomplish it ( neither do I ) would mean that you should give it a shot. I think though that instead of a tag cloud, you might want to check out Google Zeitgeist which might be a viable option. I think that with Perl in particular, seeing what people are looking for would help since with a freer form language like Perl, one needs to look at the average choices as well as the total number of choices...

[jrtayloriv]

I might give it a shot, but first I'd need the data to make the list with. It would be better to start out simple -- i.e. get the search feed implemented, and get the kinks worked out -- and then start trying to build fancy things on top of it. It's going to be hard to take a shot at creating a list of popular searches if I can't see what people are searching for....

What do you mean by your last statement? I didn't understand what you meant by average choices vs. total number of choices -- could you clarify that?