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.

In reply to Re: Feed / Tag Cloud of Recent Searches from Super Search by jrtayloriv
in thread Feed / Tag Cloud of Recent Searches from Super Search by jrtayloriv

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