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.
- Developers review search interest data.
- 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.