related searches on NYTimes.com
The rather grandly titled Mining the Collective Intelligence of NYTimes.com users announces the rather more simply titled feature of their search engine ‘Also Try’.
Also try “recommends relevant suggestions of related searches, based on a fairly simple formula. The basic principal [sic] is to cluster together all the search queries submitted to nytimes.com in the past week.”
A search for ‘caucus’ certainly brought up a set of related queries:
what is a caucus, caucus results, caucus process, new hampshire caucus, edwards caucus speech
Unfortunately the relevance of the query can’t guarantee the relevance of the results and clicking ‘what is a caucus’ seems to provide less helpful results than the original query. Can we have a Times Topic please?
Similarly a search for ‘weather’ offers ‘today’s weather’ as an alternative but that doesn’t get you any closer to a weather forecast. At least you have the comfort of knowing that you want the same thing as lots of other readers.