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Faceted search is user-friendly when applied to things like book categories in an Amazon search: Fiction (500), History (320), Biography (212), etc. But are there any nice facetted search designs (or widgets) that allow user to narrow in on a date-time range while simultaneously showing the user where search counts are distributed across the calendar.

A quick example from an analytics application: an admin user is searching site users and would like to constrain the search by the registration date field. The timeline widget (i.e. what i'm looking for) show number of occurrences per day across a 3 year span. That visual feedback shows the admin that increases in registrations is correlated with new users who registered on Thursdays. The widget let's him constraint results to all thursdays for a 16 month period. That search can help him figure out why people are registering on thursday.

Any one know of a widget that can do all that? (Preferably light-weight javascript) Or any design literature that relates to this scenario.

I've searched a couples hours so far, and the best I have found is the timeline view (pictured) built into Google analytics, which is a beaut; but i don't know if there's an open source version available.

analytics timeline widget

Kevin Brown-Silva
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ted.strauss
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I have previously searched for a widget similar to google analytics timeline view, the closest I found was the Annotated Timeline View from Google Chart Tools. For an alternative view take a look at SIMILIE Timeline Widget which shows the distribution of items across a date range, both of these could be adapted to your filtering needs with a bit of development.

Alternatively commercial analytic software like tableau can be used to visualise your data and the resulting graphs can be embedded into your web pages.

Let me know if you have found a better solution.

Nigel_V_Thomas
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  • Thanks for the tips. The google page has the normal date range selector but I haven't found an option to use the timeline style, as is pictured above. The SIMILIE one I've seen before and it is a good candidate. – ted.strauss Sep 22 '11 at 19:02