By Grant Marshall, Jan 2015.

In a previous article about Most Popular Slideshare Presentations on Big Data, I analyzed the top articles about Big Data on the site. This was achieved by using Python to gather data directly from SlideShare’s API. Since then, however, it’s been pointed out that there are some slideshares about big data that are clearly very important that were excluded.

For example, this slideshare, What is Big Data, by Bernard Marr was not included in the previous post despite having ten times the number of views of any of the slideshares included before! So clearly, using the API to retrieve the top slideshares was missing something. But just how much do these results differ? Here are the top 15 big data presentations on slideshare, using a the Google search “big data site:slideshare.net”:

Title	Username	Date	Views	Downloads	Favorites
What is Big Data?	Bernard Marr	2/28/2014	205,756	4175	222
Big Data and Big Profits	McKinsey on Marketing & Sales	11/26/2013	187,828	3289	360
Big Data - The 5 Vs Everyone Must Know	Bernard Marr	2/28/2014	157,846	3570	251
Big Data in Real-Time at Twitter	nkallen	4/19/2010	146,303	6132	665
Big Data Analytics with Hadoop	Philippe Julio	10/19/2009	114,477	2399	552
Big Data - 25 Amazing Facts Everyone Should Know	Bernard Marr	9/24/2014	98,858	2196	178
Big data landscape v 3.0 - Matt Turck (FirstMark)	Matt Turck	5/11/2014	72,695	1786	99
Big Data and Advanced Analytics	McKinsey on Marketing & Sales	7/10/2013	72,682	0	243
Big Data: The 6 Key Skills Every Business Needs	Bernard Marr	11/25/2014	67,693	738	54
Big Data: The 4 Layers Everyone Must Know	Bernard Marr	9/17/2014	65,122	1644	116
Big Data and advanced analytics	McKinsey on Marketing & Sales	12/19/2012	62,903	2	190
Big Data Trends	David Feinleib	7/24/2012	59,276	4132	219
Big data 2020	HP Software Solutions	8/12/2014	58,328	86	106
A Primer on Big Data for Business	Leslie Bradshaw	3/2/2013	48,356	362	59
Big Data in Retail - Examples in Action	David Pittman	1/24/2013	41,147	1,010	30

Immediately, compared to the results returned by the SlideShare API, we see these presentations have far more views. In fact, the presentation returned from the SlideShare API with the most views/day has fewer views/day than the least popular presentation returned from the Google search! There is definitely something strange going on here.

Figure 1: Big Data Presentation Views/Week vs. Publication Date

To understand what’s causing this difference, we must first dive into the SlideShare API. The results from the previous post were reached using these scripts (information on running them in the comments). What this does is contact the SlideShare API, request posts matching the provided query string by tag (in this case, “big data”), and return the most viewed presentations. The Google results, on the other hand, are returned from Google’s site-specific search.

So if the API is searching by tag, if we search for “big data” and the post has “big data” as a tag, we should get it right? Maybe these posts simply weren’t tagged properly? Nope! If you use SlideShare’s own API tool and search for the details of, say, “Big Data and Big Profits” by McKinsey on Marketing & Sales with “detailed” enabled, you will find this presentation does have the tag “big data”.

With this in mind, it seems the SlideShare search API doesn’t exactly return the results I’d expect. On top of this, if you choose to use the API to search by text, the results are very noisy, only being tangentially related to big data. This serves as a lesson: with the increasing availability of REST APIs to access data on the web, it’s becoming more convenient to gather data. But before you choose to use a site’s API (versus a more old-school crawler), make sure the API works as expected. Otherwise, you may miss out on data you’re interested in.

Related:

• Most Popular Slideshare Presentations on Big Data
• Debunking Big Data Myths. Again
• Data Visualization of Census Data with R