CIKM Search for Social Media Position Papers

Abdur Chowdhury Chief Scientist at Twitter (formerly at Summize).

Components in products (that lead to success?)

• Search – not ‘normal’ search behaviour; e.g. search for wwdc repeatedly looking to see what people are tweeting about the query term. #pdc2008 example ‘pretty cool’.
• UGC - (user generated content) ; jamesbuck example - ‘arrested’
• Self organization – organize content in ways that creators of system didn’t expect or intend; hash tags gone from 1% in Jan to 2% in Sep
• Social Connections – using search to find other people
• Real-time – can you guess; yes, it’s the earthquake example.

Markus Bylund: Privacy. Core idea is to provide individuals with a mirror of their online social presence so that they can learn and adapt their persisted digital presence.

Ed Chi: Introducing Mr. Taggy – a tag driven search engine. Allows for refining search via suggested tags associated with the results being served – looking forward to this coming out. http://mrtaggy.com (not live yet). I believe the data is from delicious.

Ed then talked about ‘what is social search’. They did a survey using mechanical turk to find out about people’s recent search experiences. Talks about extended context of search

1. conversation provides reason/topic of search
2. search engine only sees the specific keywords with no understanding of the social context
3. user gets results and then shares with the people involved in the discussion

The MT survey produced 150 critical-incident reports about search experience. Search is either externally-motivated (70%) or self-motivated (30%); 43% had a social interaction while ‘refining the requirements’;

Marti Hearst

“Social” Terms

• Sharing – often really means ‘not hiding’ or ‘making available’; not really sharing
• Collaboration
• Community – most social networks are not
• This workshop is called “search on social media”

What are blog searchers’ goals?

Mishne et al: 52% on named entities (mainly looking for current discussion).

• like news, in that it is current
• but different, in that it is personal
• so … finding opinions and thoughts on current events is a major goal
• but … may also want to look this up after the fact.

Blogs have personality and style (serious, sympathetic, humorous); nice to be able to select a blog based on such authorial facets.

Marc Smith (now Chief Scientist at Telligent): Leveraging Social Context for Searching Social Media. Marc spoke about analysing graphs and using that analysis to improve search.