Almost every day as I work on Able Grape I look at hundreds or thousands of queries to try to understand how people are using the search engine and how I can make it better. Today, on a lark, I took about ten thousand recent queries and put them through Jonathan Feinberg’s excellent Wordle tool to generate a word cloud from the most common search terms. Click on the image at left, or on this link, to see the full size word cloud, where the less common terms are easy to see (of course, remember that given the diverse, long, long tail of search behavior, most search terms don’t even show up).
This isn’t exactly scientific, but it does highlight a couple of things I’d like to make better: first, Able Grape’s searches are still very biased towards English… please help me get the word out in other languages! Second, lots of people still type things like “wine” or “winery” even though you don’t usually have to on Able Grape, because everything’s about wine. Anyway, a bit of Tuesday fun. Thoughts? Impressions?
Able Grapes and Garbled Peas 
Hi Doug, I just discovered your site. I’m a wine writer and educator. One of the things I run into is trying to figure out the parent company of many of today’s wineries. Oftentimes the winery site doesn’t have the level of detailed information I’m looking for, but the winery’s parent company often does, if I can only determine who it is. Do you have any ideas for solving this riddle? I typically end up doing Google searches on things like, the winery name plus “owned by” or “purchased by”, which sometimes works.