On 24/08/2025 01:57, IOhannes m zmölnig via Pd-list wrote:
On 30/07/2025 06:29, Chris McCormick wrote:
here's a random excerpt of search words (splitting all search queries of
the last 7 years into single words, removing duplicates and then
randomizing the list; finally picking a handful)
i just replayed these search-queries, and of the 26 queries, only 6 gave
any result.
The ones that give no result are the interesting ones. The user is
saying "this is what I want" and getting nothing in return.
looking specifically at multiword queries, here are a few gems (after q
quick glance at about 6000 of these queries):
```
sudo apt-get install libgstreamer-plugins-base0.10-dev
sugn wave
suma de frecuencias
super collider
surround patches
svn co https://pure-data.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/pure-data/branches/
pd-gui-rewrite/0.43/startup/
pd help browser
alexandre torres porres
Gem/0.94 (deken-archive for macOS Intel/64bit (macOS10.12+))
```
(i'm afraid, only the very last of these queries returned anything; and
only because the "easyflow" library has a [for] object - probably not
what the user was looking for)
Ranking the queries that returned nothing by frequency is what is
interesting.
so this probably tells us a bit about the expectations of people when
they encounter a search field (and thus a bit about the shortcomings of
deken as a search engine)
Yep, that's useful information about people's expectations from Deken
and maybe ways it could be improved to meet or calibrate expectations.
(especially where no results
are found).
this one might turn out trickier than expected.
i only have the webserver logfiles, that logs the actual queries and how
those queries were served. the only information about the result we can
extract from the logs, is the status code (200, also for empty results)
and the number of bytes returned.
obviously empty results require less bytes than many results.
but there's a bit of a grey area.
Ah ok, understood.
1. Developers review search interest data.
2. Developers build the things that users are looking for that don't
exist yet.
3. Users rejoice.
do you really think so?
i would have thought that the Pd ecosystem is more like the classical
open source world ("you need something yourself, but it's not available;
you implement it; then you share it") rather than (somewhat idealized)
commercial software enterprises ("you do a market analysis of what
people want; you implement it; then you sell it").
but that might very well be because of my personal background.
Yes I agree that is how the Pd ecosystem is. I would say that process is
sub-optimal for non-technical users. I guess we are privileged to be
able to solve our own problems by writing code, whereas for the vast
majority of Pd users that's a significant undertaking and they rely on
volunteer developers to improve things.
I should say, I'm not proposing anybody sell anything.
but anyhow: no i had no plans to publish statistics about the search
terms and downloads.
most likely because for me this has a "(a)social media" smell, where
software contributions get "ranked", making developers of popular
packages "better" than those of niche packages.
Yes, agree, that's gross.
the idea about statistics for empty search terms is interesting, but i'm
not sure how much work is required to clean up the data from simple
typos / invalid queries, to get something meaningful.
Yep fair enough. I understand it would take work.
Typos and invalid queries are a very useful signal though. They tell you
where users are making mistakes or using Deken in a way it's not
designed for. The frequency of common typos and invalid queries tells
you how sharp the problem is = how bad your own UI/documention is, which
is causing the issue for those users.
I think even the list of 6000 terms ranked by frequency would be
interesting (even if you filtered out actual package names).
Anyway, I know you spend a lot of time and effort maintaining these
systems. I'm grateful for that and definitely not asking you to do more
work than you already do! It was just a random idea that I thought might
help end-users of Pd in some way.
Cheers,
Chris.
--
https://mccormick.cx/
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