Clustering of Hot Topics
The 'Hot Topics' clusters on the left-hand side of the front page represents stories that have shown a recent burst of activity, above their mean for the last 30 days. Key phrases extracted from each item are monitored, and if they appear over a threshold level then stories attached to that phrase are used as Hot Topics.
Previously phrases were clustered around items, which meant that often two separate stories would be inappropriately clustered together; now the clustering code has been rewritten to group items around phrases, which so far seems to work much better.
Hopefully the interesting, bursting topics on the front page will now be more clearly defined and easier to read.