The AOL researchers intended the data to be used for research purposes, and, in fact, it contains a wealth of information about everyday historical consciousness that is useful for public historians. With the proper tools, the AOL search data can be easily mined to discover what kinds of historical topics people are interested in and how they go about trying to find them. We can then use that information to shape the architecture of our online sites. The results presented below were generated in a couple of hours with off-the-shelf tools.
The AOL data are distributed as a compressed archive which uncompresses to 10 text files totalling about 2.12 Gb. I used a program called TextPipe Pro to extract all of the searches with 'history' in them. I then loaded these into Concordance, another commercial program, to do the text analysis. True to its name, Concordance lets you create concordances and tables of collocations. (Readers of this blog will know that both of these tasks could be easily accomplished with a programming language like Python, but I wanted to show that you don't have to be able to program to do simple data mining.) The process of extracting the searches and creating a concordance for the 57291 tokens of 'history' was very fast. It took less than five minutes on a not-very-expensive desktop computer running Win XP.
Given a concordance, we are in a position to explore what kinds of searches include the word 'history'. For example, suppose someone is interested in US History. They could frame their search in many ways: 'American history', 'history of the United States', and so on. If you are trying to reach users with an online history site, you want to know what kinds of searches they are going to use to get to you. The table below shows the various possibilities that were used by AOL searchers more than fifty times. (Note that I don't include searches for individual states, that the phrase 'American history' is a substring of other phrases like 'African American history' and 'Latin American history', and that the concordance program allows us to search for collocations separated by intervening words.)
american history 998
us history 379
american X history 99
history X american 92
united X history 85
states history 83
history X X america 78
us X history 67
american X X history 63
america history 62
These data seem to indicate a fairly strong preference for the adjectival form. People, in other words, prefer to think of the subject as American or US History rather than the History of the US or of America. The AOL data provide stronger evidence for this search than for most others, but the pattern appears in other regional or national contexts. For example, 'european history' (67) vs. 'history of europe' (3), 'chinese history' (32) vs. 'history of china' (17). More work would obviously be needed to make any kind of strong claim. And some thematic subjects show the opposite pattern, e.g., 'technology history' (4) vs. 'history of technology' (10).
Digging in the search data reveals some unexpected patterns. Some people search for historical topics using a possessive like 'alaska's history' (11), 'canada's history' (5), or 'china's history' (2). When I was adding meta tags to our History Department website, this one never occurred to me but it makes sense in retrospect. If you sort the data by the right context (the stuff that appears after the word 'history') you also find that many people are trying to use dates to limit their searches in a way that most search engines don't allow.
england history 1350 to 1850
french history 1400's
world history 1500 through 1850
world history 1500-1750
women history 1620-1776
italian history 1750's
ancient history 1735 bc
russian history 1880-1900
texas history 1890s law
texas history 1900s news
salvadoran history 1980s
east harlem history 19th century
Unfortunately, searching for '1400's' won't yield dates in the range 1400-1499, it will merely match the literal string '1400's'. Likewise, searching for '1350 to 1850' will only return pages that have '1350' or '1850' in them. Searching for '19th century' will give better results but still miss many relevant documents. I hope that companies that are working on search engines have noticed that people want to do these kind of searches, as it would make the web much more useful for historical research if you could.
The prepositional form really comes into its own for more idiosyncratic searches. Apparently people want to know the histories of
1892 carlsbad austria china teapots
a and w root beer
acne
alfredo sauce
banoffee pie
bingham hill cemetery
blood gangs and hand shakes
celtic body art
chakras
coleus plant
dental hygiene in america
do rags
easter egg hunt
emlen physick
everything video game releated
family feud
fat tuesday
girls sweet sixteen birthdays
gorzkie zale
half pipe in snowboarding
hex nuts
impala ss
irrational numbers
jang bo go
jay-z
k9 german sheppards
kissing
l'eggs hosiery
laminated dough
macho man
motion offense in basketball
myspace
nalgene
national pi day
oreos
paper marbling
patzcuaro
quad rugby
resident evil
residential wiring systems
salads
shaving legs
toilet paper
trolls
tv dinners
ultrasound
using wine
v8 juice
vikings ruins in okla
watts towers
wifebeaters
xbox
yankee doodle dandy
zombie movies
There's no adjectival form for these. The history of sport may be interesting to sport historians, but to whom is the history of hex nuts interesting? More people than you'd think.
Finally, we can also see the AOL users' concern with privacy in the data. The concordance software allows us to see which words appear most frequently 1 position to the left of 'history' and 1 position to the right, 2 positions to the left and 2 positions to the right, and so on. The left collocations are most informative in this case. We find, for example, that 'clear' is the third most frequently appearing word 1 position to the left of 'history'. Fourteen hundred and thirteen different searches included the phrase 'clear history', 563 the phrase 'delete history' and 208 'erase history'. If we look 2 positions to the left, we find more searches with similar intent 'clear X history' (510), 'delete X history' (353) and 'erase X history' (140). Ironically, many of these searches also include 'AOL' as a collocate, e.g., 'how do i delete my history on aol' or 'remove my history from aol'. The table below summarizes these collocations.
| my 199 | my 1836 | history | |
| clear 123 | clear 510 | clear 1413 | history |
| aol 41 | aol 238 | aol 668 | history |
| delete 71 | delete 353 | delete 563 | history |
| search 382 | history | ||
| erase 140 | erase 208 | history | |
| browser 132 | history |
Of course, this is merely the tip of the iceberg. Much more could be found by studying, for example, how people use dates in searches or what kinds of things they are looking for when they visit particular websites.
Tags: AOL search data | concordance | data mining | findability | KWIC | public history | search | text mining