Fresh data insights from Automattic.
Dive into our blog where we turn complex data into clear, actionable insights. Stay tuned for fresh perspectives and expert advice from the heart of Automattic’s data team.
-
Intro to Search: Measurement
Welcome to the third part of our mini-series “Intro to Search.” In my previous posts, I’ve discussed the characteristics of great search results and what a search engine looks like from the inside. But, how do we know if our algorithms actually deliver relevant search results? The answer is, of course, by measurement! There is…
-
This Week in Data Reading
There’s nothing tastier than a set of links to devour! Check out what we’ve been reading recently and be sure to share your links to thought-provoking articles and discussions on topics in the field of data science.
-
A Brand Image Analysis of WordPress and Automattic on Twitter
As a data scientist, I spend a lot of time analyzing how our users interact with WordPress.com. However, WordPress.com isn’t the only place to gain insight into how people use and talk about our services. Many WordPress.org and WordPress.com discussions take place on social media. Analyzing these discussions can help us understand what our users are…
-
Bulk Log Analytics With Hive
Leveraging the distributed powers of MapReduce to perform custom log analysis or some one-time queries on the raw data is fast and easy and you don’t even have to build a complicated ETL process to do it. The data engineering team at WordPress.com recently used this approch to query tens of billions of log lines…
-
Evolution of a Plot: Better Data Visualization, One Step at a Time
The goal of data visualization is to transform numbers into insights. However, default data visualization output often disappoints. Sometimes, the graph shows irrelevant data or misses important aspects; sometimes, the graph lacks context; sometimes, it’s difficult to read. Often, data practitioners “feel” that something isn’t right with the graph, but cannot pinpoint the problem. In this…
-
Network Science at Automattic: Mapping the Communities of WP.com — Methodology
If you have read our analysis on the communities of WordPress.com and would like to know more about the methods behind it, then keep on reading! In this — slightly more technical — post, I will show how we constructed, filtered, projected, and clustered a network around WordPress.com users and blogs. Building the Network of WP.com People…
-
Intro to Search: Anatomy of a search engine
Welcome to the second post in our “Intro to Search”-series! Today, we’ll dig into the building blocks of search engines to give you an idea of just how we identify what posts to show readers using WordPress.com’s search tool. A (web) search engine connects users with relevant documents. This process generally has five main stages:…
-
Network Science at Automattic: Mapping the Communities of WP.com
WordPress.com is home to hundreds of millions of sites, a place to produce and discover content. Logging in, you’re automatically taken to the Reader, where you’ll find a stream of posts from sites you follow or that we’ve recommended for you. You can like, reblog, or comment on these posts. If you’re inspired, you can choose to publish a…
-
Intro to Search: Initial Considerations
This post is the first in a series about what we learned from developing search products for WordPress.com. In this post, I’ll give you a brief tour of some learnings from deploying search in the WordPress.com Reader. Improving this search tool to help our users find engaging articles they really like is an effort, and an…
-
State of WordPress.com Elasticsearch Systems 2016
We get asked periodically about how extensively we are using Elasticsearch. And it has come up twice in the past week, so time to write a blog post. We are constantly expanding what we are using Elasticsearch for and so although some previous posts have broadly define what we are doing, they don’t really capture the…
Data for Breakfast 