Granular Data Project at Planet Chiropractic
Programmers at planetchiropractic.com were recently looking at the growing list of thousands of news articles that exist on the popular chiropractic website.
Even though the web site has offered several different ways for visitors to view and search information, programmers are always at work seeking ways to better improve the end-users experience. A topic that came up during the past few weeks was how to make lists of some of the most popular words searched in news content available to end-users.
It’s becoming more and more popular to see something called tagging or clouds appearing on Web 2.0 web sites. One of the problems was that planetc1.com is built on Web 1.0 architecture and the web site still uses CGI and Perl heavily. Here’s what was rolled out after carefully studying some of the new popular tagging features appearing on other web sites…
- Planet Chiropractic searched their news article database for words popular on the chiropractic web site
- an alphabetical list of those most popular words was created and saved in a flat file text database
- a simple list of letters from the alphabet were added to the main search page
As a result, clicking on the letter of the alphabet brought up a list of popular words being searched, along with the regular search box. The result was a far easier way to browse through over nine years of chiropractic related news content. Someone may not have thought to search the name of a popular chiropractor or technique, but with that information appearing there for the user, it becomes more likely the content will be viewed, and the user will have the experience they were seeking.
You can view the alphabetical keyword search system directly from the main chiropractic search page.
The Web company is expected to use the same technique and technologies to deliver targeted search results for their classified ad system, chiropractic seminar network, and list of chiropractors in the USA and Canada.
