Best Bets

I attended “The Accidental Thesaurus: Enhancing Search Precision through Manual-Selected Best Bets” presented by Richard Wiggins at the IA Summit. Inspired as I was, I didn’t get around to implementing the same thing for Columbia until recently. Crunching a year’s worth of query logs from our Ultraseek server revealed much the same distribution curve that he found at Michigan State University. (See Beyond the Spider: The Accidental Thesaurus(PDF))

My results:

From the IAwiki:

• Best Bets
• Pareto Principle
• Zipf Distribution as one of various Statistical Laws