I had never heard of text mining before, so the reading this week was particularly interesting to me. When I first read about topic modeling, I thought this would be an interesting thing to do with Slaughter and Murray’s letters, but then I saw that to do this, you need one hundred items at the very least, and we fall short. But, other ways of text mining seem to be useful for our purposes and may be potential methods to increase traffic to our site. In William Turkel’s article “Searching for History,” he talks about AOL’s release of search data in August 2006 and how information like this is useful for historians to see what kinds of things people are searching for in relation to history. Although this could be beneficial in that historians could include key words on their sites that match up with popular search terms, where would one find the information to mine? AOL released data, but soon took it down because people had used things like credit card numbers in their searches. Do other search engines, such as Google, release search data that excludes sensitive information like this?
I Googled “Google search data” and one of the first things that came up was “Google Trends—Think with Google” (https://www.thinkwithgoogle.com/tools/google-trends.html). I clicked on it and the basic description that popped up was “The Rundown: How do people search for your brand? When do searches spike? What about your competitors? The Google Trends tool uses real-time search data to help you gauge consumer search behaviors over time.” You can search for certain terms and Google Trends will give you a graph that shows you interest in a topic over time. I need to play with it some more, but given the description of this tool given by Google, it seems to be more geared towards businesses, but could prove to be useful to increase traffic to our site.
