Legal Research

Are Questions and Searches Predictable?

"Prediction is very difficult, especially if it's about the future."
Niels Bohr

The Noisy Channel has an interesting post that made me think. Read the whole thing here.

"Google in particular has been researching the predictability of search trends (just to be fair and balanced, so have Bing and Yahoo). Yossi Matias, Niv Efron, and Yair Shimshoni at Google Labs Israel have made some fascinating observations based on Google Trends, including the following:

?Over half of the most popular Google search queries are predictable in a 12 month ahead forecast, with a mean absolute prediction error of about 12%.
?Nearly half of the most popular queries are not predictable (with respect to the model we have used).
?Some categories have particularly high fraction of predictable queries; for instance, Health (74%), Food & Drink (67%) and Travel (65%).
?Some categories have particularly low fraction of predictable queries; for instance, Entertainment (35%) and Social Networks & Online Communities (27%).
?The trends of aggregated queries per categories are much more predictable: 88% of the aggregated category search trends of over 600 categories in Insights for Search are predictable, with a mean absolute prediction error of of less than 6%.

You can read their full 32-page paper here."

What it made me think about was to question what percentage of library questions - online or in person - are predictable. Of course, we know the seasonal questions and those related to curriculum needs etc. How much better could we provide service if we were able to predict and prepare for a significant percentage of queries?

Stephen

Full post as published by Stephen's Lighthouse on September 05, 2009 (boomark / email).