Our paper showing search over Twitter content can provide useful results that complement web search results from Google and Bing has been accepted for presentation at the 21st ACM SIGKDD Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (KDD 2015). This version supplants our Technical Report TR-2015-002. We welcome your feedback and comments.
Abstract:
Access to diverse perspectives nurtures an informed citizenry. Google and Bing have emerged as the duopoly that largely arbitrates which English language documents are seen by web searchers. A recent study shows that there is now a large overlap in the top organic search results produced by them. Thus, citizens may no longer be able to gain different perspectives by using different search engines.
We present the results of our empirical study that indicates that by mining Twitter data one can obtain search results that are quite distinct from those produced by Google and Bing. Additionally, our user study found that these results were quite informative. The gauntlet is now on search engines to test whether our findings hold in their infrastructure for different social networks and whether enabling diversity has sufficient business imperative for them.
Bibtex Entry:
@inproceedings{AGP15:whither,
title={Whither Social Networks for Web Search?},
author={Rakesh Agrawal and Behzad Golshan and Evangelos Papalexakis},
booktitle={21st ACM SIGKDD Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining},
month={August},
year={2015},
address={Sydney}
}