Re: introducing deken trends

IOhannes m zmölnig via Pd-list <[email protected]> Sat, 23 Aug 2025 19:57:35 +0200
Newsgroups	gmane.comp.multimedia.puredata.general
Message-ID	<[email protected]>
thanks all for your feedback.

i just realized, that i never answered any of this so.

On 30/07/2025 06:29, Chris McCormick wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> On 28/07/2025 23:02, IOhannes m zmoelnig via Pd-list wrote:
>> i've just setup a new (experimental) webservice, that shows some graph 
>> about trends in the usage of Pd, based on deken queries.
> 
> 
> This is really cool, thanks for sharing the anonymous data.
> 
> As well as the data you have shared, it is often useful for developers 
> to know what users actually want. In lieu of actually speaking to human 
> beings (horrifying), one way to accomplish this is to look at search 
> volume data. I think it would be useful for Pd developers to be able to 
> see a) which packages people are installing the most

the data that i'm currently analysing, does not say anything about what 
people are *installing*. i'm only recording the search queries 
themselves. (obviously the downloads are recorded in the logs of the 
relevant webserver as well (which is really distinct from the deken 
frontend), but those logfiles are not kept very long. i currently only 
have 2 weeks of data for this.


> b) what else people 
> are searching for in the deken search bar > 

i'm not entirely sure about the actual usefulness of this.

here's a random excerpt of search words (splitting all search queries of 
the last 7 years into single words, removing duplicates and then 
randomizing the list; finally picking a handful)

```
colorSquare
compress_limit*
*simplex*
timeS
applez
stretcher
es5encoder~
/home/oh/Escriptori/OH.R+D/musIA/Code/ANN.Pd/ann-master
bowed~
RTC
solus
shel
xenakis
C03.zipper.noise.pd
adsp
frid
Live-Electronics-Tutorials
csm
pixie
b07
writ
sgvisu~
multi*
tlse
iemlib/iemlib2
v0.0.0-alpha
```

as you can see, people are making typos, searching for version number or 
even files (presumably on their own disk).

i just replayed these search-queries, and of the 26 queries, only 6 gave 
any result.

looking specifically at multiword queries, here are a few gems (after q 
quick glance at about 6000 of these queries):

```
sudo apt-get install libgstreamer-plugins-base0.10-dev
sugn wave
suma de frecuencias
super collider
surround patches
svn co 
https://pure-data.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/pure-data/branches/pd-gui-rewrite/0.43/startup/
pd help browser
alexandre torres porres
Gem/0.94 (deken-archive for macOS Intel/64bit (macOS10.12+))
```

(i'm afraid, only the very last of these queries returned anything; and 
only because the "easyflow" library has a [for] object - probably not 
what the user was looking for)

so this probably tells us a bit about the expectations of people when 
they encounter a search field (and thus a bit about the shortcomings of 
deken as a search engine)


(especially where no results
> are found).


this one might turn out trickier than expected.
i only have the webserver logfiles, that logs the actual queries and how 
those queries were served. the only information about the result we can 
extract from the logs, is the status code (200, also for empty results) 
and the number of bytes returned.
obviously empty results require less bytes than many results.
but there's a bit of a grey area.




> 
> Summary:
> 
> 1. Developers review search interest data.
> 2. Developers build the things that users are looking for that don't 
> exist yet.
> 3. Users rejoice.

do you really think so?

i would have thought that the Pd ecosystem is more like the classical 
open source world ("you need something yourself, but it's not available; 
you implement it; then you share it") rather than (somewhat idealized) 
commercial software enterprises ("you do a market analysis of what 
people want; you implement it; then you sell it").
but that might very well be because of my personal background.


but anyhow: no i had no plans to publish statistics about the search 
terms and downloads.
most likely because for me this has a "(a)social media" smell, where 
software contributions get "ranked", making developers of popular 
packages "better" than those of niche packages.

the idea about statistics for empty search terms is interesting, but i'm 
not sure how much work is required to clean up the data from simple 
typos / invalid queries, to get something meaningful.


gmdsar
IOhannes

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