blyberg.net » AADL “Search Cloud”

Life’s had me buried, so I’ve neglected my blog–be kind and cut me some slack!

At any rate, my little holiday treat this year is a catalog search cloud for the AADL catalog. For about four months now, I’ve been collecting search statistics on queries done against our catalog with the sole intention of creating this little proof-of-concept app.

Basically, it looks at the {x} most popular searches in the past {x} days and generates, what we all recognize, as a tag cloud of those searches with links into the catalog for each.

I say this is a “proof-of-concept” feature because in the coming months, we’ll be launching into our AADL.ORG 3.3 development push which will, hopefully, include a whole lot more of this type of stuff.

Have a safe, happy holiday. I won’t take 2 months to do another post, I promise!

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9 Comments so far
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Wowie! What interests me most is how many people type in search terms using articles–”the da vinci code” (and “the davinci code”), “the devil wears Prada,” etc. And yet many of the authors are entered as lastname, firstname. It’s a fascinating peek into user searching habits, and what bits of that bibliographic instruction we’re all subjected to at one point in school stick and which don’t.

John — have you any stats on failed searches (i.e. that produced zero results)?

When I generated the cloud for our OPAC searches, I found the analysis of the failed searches provided some useful information about our users:

http://www.daveyp.com/blog/index.php/archives/147/

…it’d be interesting to know if any of your patrons typed “renew” into the search box too!

I love this idea. I have been wanting to get data from opac on what people are reading but I am having trouble doing this well. This is great! I can look at searching topics with no probelm. I am sorry John but I am going to have to copy this idea. Have a great Xmas

[…] It is always funny. Tim and I were talking about this idea of creating a list of top items that people were searching at the ACPL. John Blyberg has created the search term cloud. This is such a great idea I am going to have to copy it. Sorry John […]

John,

Following Dave’s lead, I proposed something similar a while back. My boss is convinced that kids will attempt to manipulate the cloud. Are you taking any measures to control what appears in the cloud?

Not sure if you saw it but she was more impressed with my proposal for a genre cloud.

Happy Holidays!

Mike — I’m not sure about John, but you’d have to be determined as you’d need to rack up over a 1000 separate searches to make it into the cloud. Also, I’ve only used words from successful searches so you’d also have to pick a word that produces results.

I don’t know about your Librarians, but at Huddersfield one of the first thing they did was to look for amusing sequences of words in the cloud (e.g. “self service sex skills” and “understanding victorian violence”)!

Dave,

Thanks for the info. The way we’re currently building our cloud is only based on 10 days worth of searches so it would be easier to manipulate than yours would be (less than 100 searches to get in, certainly). But that may in fact be the answer, to look at a bigger time period (although our system does not naturally keep that AFAIK).

Well, if you’re going to go in this direction, you’ll inevitably wind up handing over a fair amount of power to your users. Abuse will happen. Just have policy and procedure in place to deal with vandalism as it comes. We have yet to see it in any significant amount and we’re really not worried about it at all. If you ignore it and don’t make a big deal of it when it happens, the payoff isn’t big enough for them to try it again.

John

I know why “cookery” is a prominent search string in your results - that’s via an RSS subscription to cookbook updates in the catalog that I’m subscribed to.

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