Monday, October 17, 2011

Popular searches at the Smithsonian website

A few minutes ago I was at the Smithsonian's "CollectionsSearchCenter" page studying how they classify photographs (doing this for my Information Retrieval course at SJSU).

At the bottom of the page there is a list of popular searches. The format of the image is familiar, with more popular searches shown in larger font.

The program that does that list for them shows 21 popular searches. One is Cheyenne Indians, and the other is "american+indians". I wonder who is doing all that searching, and why? And, I wonder what that list looks like, say, in February? Would Martin Luther King be in the top 21?