Related Searches

From MoochWiki

When you search for something now on BookMooch, you will see some “related searches” shown to you

Up to 3 recommendations are displayed on the search results page.

Clicking the “…” link will lead you to a longer list:

Here is how the related searches are arrived at:

- for a year now, every search that everyone (who is logged in) makes, has been saved

- so, for a single search, BM first looks to see which other members have also searched for these words you’ve just searched for

- all the words those other members have ever searched for are all aggregated

- search words that occur less than 3 times are discarded as too infrequent to be relevant

- the list of search words is sorted, in order of how often it it is searched by these other members

- searches that would yield “no results” are automatically not displayed. This is a time consuming process for BookMooch, as it means BM actually has to run the full search for each recommendation it would make. For this reason, I’m caching recommendations for 24 hours, and that’s also why only 20 “related searches” are shown at one time (you have to page next/previous through them)