Searching for places on the Â鶹¹ÙÍøÊ×Ò³Èë¿Ú
were wondering the other day how much people search for local information from the Â鶹¹ÙÍøÊ×Ò³Èë¿Ú, so as a quick hack we got hold of the top 10,000 search terms from the bbc.co.uk search logs for one day, July 9th. Then using the we extracted any UK place names from the search terms, counted them up and plotted them on a map*. It's just a little thing but we thought it might be interesting.
* though I removed the map from the final rendering, I think it's prettier that way.
Tristan Ferne is Senior Development Producer, R&D, FM&T for Audio & Music Interactive.
Comment number 1.
At 22nd Jul 2009, FishFingers wrote:Yet more evidence that the Â鶹¹ÙÍøÊ×Ò³Èë¿Ú's output is London-centric.
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Comment number 2.
At 22nd Jul 2009, TV Licence fee payer against Â鶹¹ÙÍøÊ×Ò³Èë¿Ú censorship wrote:1. At 7:38pm on 22 Jul 2009, neiltc13 wrote:
"Yet more evidence that the Â鶹¹ÙÍøÊ×Ò³Èë¿Ú's output is London-centric."
Can't agree, if it does show any London-centric bias then it shows a London-centric audience, these results were based on bbc.co.uk search logs not the URL click-through web server results.
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Comment number 3.
At 23rd Jul 2009, hitmouse wrote:"it shows a London-centric audience" - and the reason for this? That the Â鶹¹ÙÍøÊ×Ò³Èë¿Ú output is so London-centric that the rest of the country pays less attention.
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Comment number 4.
At 23rd Jul 2009, yhapster wrote:I disagree with the "London-centric audience" statement. Sooooo many people I know from across the country have the Â鶹¹ÙÍøÊ×Ò³Èë¿Ú as their homepage, or part of their homepage. I don't live in London but I check London local news regularly because it is the capital city, family & friends live there etc. etc. London will always have the most hits, it makes sense.
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Comment number 5.
At 23rd Jul 2009, mktgDIGITAL wrote:Tristan - it's an interesting take on things, but what does it really tell you and us?
Searches on Â鶹¹ÙÍøÊ×Ò³Èë¿Ú are location centric and pretty much follow the population locations - wow that's news worthy. The anomaly for Newquay is probably based on the sad story of the teenager who fell off the cliffs and I think we can all work out the reason for a big result for Glastonbury.
What would be more interesting and certainly a lot more valid, would be to plot the correlation between IP location and location search term.
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Comment number 6.
At 23rd Jul 2009, tristanf wrote:@mktgDIGITAL - I agree and I'm certainly not claiming it tells us anything profound. It really was just a couple of hours of hacking to see what it might throw up. But maybe it points the way to something else- surfacing stories which people think are important or showing up places which the Â鶹¹ÙÍøÊ×Ò³Èë¿Ú doesn't have much content about? Maybe we should normalise the map against population density?
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Comment number 7.
At 23rd Jul 2009, cping500 wrote:It's also to do with the two local news rows, sharing local news tv facilities, and the Â鶹¹ÙÍøÊ×Ò³Èë¿Ú v the local newspaper publishers which means that there is not a very effective Â鶹¹ÙÍøÊ×Ò³Èë¿Ú web local news service apart from crime (though it has become a little more variable recently) There seems little cross platform work even with the major TV local programmes.
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Comment number 8.
At 23rd Jul 2009, TV Licence fee payer against Â鶹¹ÙÍøÊ×Ò³Èë¿Ú censorship wrote:In reply to comments @ #3 and 4
Sorry but these are search results, people wanting London-centric information, it's NOT a result based on the number of page hits or article title count etc. In fact if you look at the map and add together all the areas outside of the claimed 'London-centric area' you will see that there are more NON London-centric area searches than there are London-centric...
It's impossible to make a judgement about Â鶹¹ÙÍøÊ×Ò³Èë¿Ú content from what people search for, had there been a major story (or even rumour) about - for example - Ludlow and thus a high number of searches using "Ludlow" as a search term would you be claiming that the Â鶹¹ÙÍøÊ×Ò³Èë¿Ú was 'Ludlow-centric'?!
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Comment number 9.
At 23rd Jul 2009, Secret Love wrote:Remember the search is based on UK place names ~ how many people put London into a search ? You can understand Glastonbury, but why London ?
Â鶹¹ÙÍøÊ×Ò³Èë¿Ú coverage is London-centric, whilst some of this is natural given that London is the capital, other parts of it relfect the ease with which reporters can reach London locations. Too often London locations are used to reflect national stories.
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Comment number 10.
At 23rd Jul 2009, Hymagumba wrote:on the subject of searching, have the /topics pages been axed? if so what was the thinking behind this? did they simply not work as intended?
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Comment number 11.
At 23rd Jul 2009, jas wrote:For those obsessed with London centered-ness, look at any population density map; look at any measure of economic output and activity vs. areas on the UK. The only rational conclusion is that the UK would be nothing without the SE of England, so be grateful. It is no surprise that there is so much activity there in almost any field you take the time to look at. I live in the Scottish part of the UK.
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Comment number 12.
At 23rd Jul 2009, Green Soap wrote:Is the choice of date for the map an attempt to justify the Â鶹¹ÙÍøÊ×Ò³Èë¿Ú Junketing to Glasto?
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At 30th Mar 2010, U14402580 wrote:This comment was removed because the moderators found it broke the house rules. Explain.
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