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Speaker "Dhruv Sampat" Details Back

 

Topic

An approach to internal search query analysis

Abstract

Course Hero is an education technology company that provides subscription services for accessing crowd-sourced study materials. Our business is driven by SEO and having the most selective student generated materials related to a course. We show a small preview of the content to the search engines, which gets indexed. When users search any long-tailed education related queries for which our content is relevant, our content link would show up among the top results. This is how our product gets visibility. We have 3 main types of content on our website: student generated study documents, Q&A, and flashcard sets. Our internal search functionality is the method by which our customers discover content on our website. Content consumption and engagement metrics provide insightful information about the relevancy of our internal search algorithm and the quality of our content repository. Data mining these metrics helps us understand what our customers' demands are and how well our product is catering to them. Using unstructured search query data, as well as structured consumption and engagement metrics, we mined a meaningful list of high value content categories that yielded a sizeable traffic increase. As a part of the talk, we will be going over the analytical methodology for mining and identifying these high value categories.

Profile

Dhruv Sampat is the VP of Analytics at Course Hero, an online learning platform for students to access study resources like course materials, flashcards, and tutors. He joined the company in 2011 and has helped it grow into a leading platform for online study help. Dhruv has been in the analytics domain for 7 years. Prior to joining Course Hero he was the first business analyst at Chegg where he worked very closely with the Product and Marketing teams and also did an internship at Facebook where he worked with the IT Business applications team. Outside of work he is passionate about new technological developments in the field of analytics and reading books on leadership and strategic management. He holds a Master of Science degree in Management Science and Engineering from Stanford University and an undergrad degree in Computer Science from University of Mumbai