TY - GEN
T1 - New-web search with microblog annotations
AU - Rowlands, Tom
AU - Hawking, David
AU - Sankaranarayana, Ramesh
PY - 2010
Y1 - 2010
N2 - Web search engines discover indexable documents by recursively 'crawling' from a seed URL. Their rankings take into account link popularity. While this works well, it introduces biases towards older documents. Older documents are more likely to be the target of links, while new documents with few, or no, incoming links are unlikely to rank highly in search results. We describe a novel system for 'new-Web' search based on links retrieved from the Twitter micro-blogging service. The Twitter service allows individuals, organisations and governments to rapidly disseminate very short messages to a wide variety of interested parties. When a Twitter message contains a URL, we use the Twitter message as a description of the URL's target. As Twitter is frequently used for discussion of current events, these messages offer useful, up- to-date annotations and instantaneous popularity readings for a small, but timely, portion of the Web. Our working system is simple and fast and we believe may offer a significant advantage in revealing new information on the Web that would otherwise be hidden from searchers. Beyond the basic system, we anticipate the Twitter messages may add supplementary terms for a URL, or add weight to existing terms, and that the reputation or authority of each message sender may serve to weight both annotations and query-independent popularity.
AB - Web search engines discover indexable documents by recursively 'crawling' from a seed URL. Their rankings take into account link popularity. While this works well, it introduces biases towards older documents. Older documents are more likely to be the target of links, while new documents with few, or no, incoming links are unlikely to rank highly in search results. We describe a novel system for 'new-Web' search based on links retrieved from the Twitter micro-blogging service. The Twitter service allows individuals, organisations and governments to rapidly disseminate very short messages to a wide variety of interested parties. When a Twitter message contains a URL, we use the Twitter message as a description of the URL's target. As Twitter is frequently used for discussion of current events, these messages offer useful, up- to-date annotations and instantaneous popularity readings for a small, but timely, portion of the Web. Our working system is simple and fast and we believe may offer a significant advantage in revealing new information on the Web that would otherwise be hidden from searchers. Beyond the basic system, we anticipate the Twitter messages may add supplementary terms for a URL, or add weight to existing terms, and that the reputation or authority of each message sender may serve to weight both annotations and query-independent popularity.
KW - demonstration
KW - information retrieval
KW - microblogging
KW - search
KW - twitter
KW - web search
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=77954593724&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1145/1772690.1772905
DO - 10.1145/1772690.1772905
M3 - Conference contribution
SN - 9781605587998
T3 - Proceedings of the 19th International Conference on World Wide Web, WWW '10
SP - 1293
EP - 1296
BT - Proceedings of the 19th International Conference on World Wide Web, WWW '10
T2 - 19th International World Wide Web Conference, WWW2010
Y2 - 26 April 2010 through 30 April 2010
ER -