Martin Belam from the BBCi search team is thinking about how ‘word bursts’ could help improve the performance of our “best links” recommendations:

“…what I set out to do was to capture these ‘bursts’ of words from day-to-day on the service. That in itself isn’t hard, my principle of comparing snapshots of the service usage and calculating the differences works fine for this, but there is no context to the individual words.

Because it is nearly comic relief day, there were bursts in the use of ‘red’, ‘nose’ and ‘day’ as individual words within search – but on their own, without a human eye over them, they don’t logically group themselves together.

I wanted to find a way to put them into their context automatically for our editorial team – so they can concentrate on finding the best sites for our users, and not have to second-guess how they are going to look for them.”

» Currybet.net: “word bursts within BBC search log”