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The most popular links posted by developers to Stack Overflow

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Re: The most popular links posted by developers to Stack Overflow

#61
post #59
post #56

Doesn't work on an iPad. I type in my search term, press enter, and nothing happens. Furthermore, when I enter my search term, the "Filter by tag (e.g. javascript)" text doesn't disappear.

Wow - ok looking into that now. What version of ios?

The latest, iOS 6.1.3

Re: The most popular links posted by developers to Stack Overflow

#62
post #14

I'd be interested in seeing what happens when you bucket citations by domain instead of URL. Google Analytics counts over a thousand unique referring SO pages to Cocoa Controls ( http://www.cocoacontrols.com ) this year alone. But, of course, most of the links back to my site are long tail.

Great idea, will try and look at that next.

thanks!

Re: The most popular links posted by developers to Stack Overflow

#65
post #60

This is nicely done, but so far isn't returning anything interesting for me. All the results are very basic (Django docs, PHP docs, etc), which makes sense, the most often cited will be the most general. What about a change in algorithm to try and add some discovery here. What if you look at votes for answers vs cites? So things that have a high average vote:cite ratio rank?

Thanks. Yea i agree our initial use case was to provide an interface to the dataset and to allow us to explore what kinds of things developers were sharing on SO. For the next version we are working on new ranking metrics that will improve the discover aspect, vote:cite and view:cite are 2 we are looking at.

Looking forward to v2!

Re: The most popular links posted by developers to Stack Overflow

#66

Ha, the top result for C is the spec. Every other language is a popular library. I wonder if there are more RTFM-type responses for C than other languages.

I suspect it has more to do with the large amount of undefined/unspecified/implementation defined behavior in C. A lot of questions on Stack Overflow can only be answered correctly by referring the the standard.

Re: The most popular links posted by developers to Stack Overflow

#67

Does this scrape links from the comments posted to questions as well?

No just the post bodies (question and answers) at the moment, but we are working parsing the comments and the post history, those datasets are about 4 times the size of the posts! So there are probably a lot more URLs in there, although we will have to decide if we treat all URLs the same or if we differentiate between URLs in post bodies contained in the dump, URLs in the post history (that may have been removed from the post) and URLs in the comments. Not maybe a concern for the website, but more so for research.

Re: The most popular links posted by developers to Stack Overflow

#68

i dunno... 11 of the top 14 links under the "Javascript" tag are about jquery (which has it's own tag). I suppose it's not a flaw in your algorithm, just not really very interesting results.

I know javascript and jQuery suffer from their popularity and utility I think in this analysis. There is also the issue of jQuery and javascript tags being used by people as synonyms. jQuery particularly is a 500 pound gorilla over all the dataset, it shows up everywhere. As I mentioned above there was a joke on SO at one point that the answer to nearly every question was jQuery with a link to the site. Apparently it wasn't a joke.

Re: The most popular links posted by developers to Stack Overflow

#69
post #67

Does this scrape links from the comments posted to questions as well?

No just the post bodies (question and answers) at the moment, but we are working parsing the comments and the post history, those datasets are about 4 times the size of the posts! So there are probably a lot more URLs in there, although we will have to decide if we treat all URLs the same or if we differentiate between URLs in post bodies contained in the dump, URLs in the post history (that may have been removed fro…

You usually see notes or clarification posted to questions in the form of comments first, where the types of links are more introductory, general purpose, than specific as you might find in answers.

Can't wait to see the updated stats.

If you could make "more" load more than just a few more records, though, that'd make it a lot easier to dig deeper.

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