This new technical report is a companion report to our earlier study that found a large overlap in the Web search results provided by Google and Bing. It shows that search over Twitter data can provide useful results that can compliment Web search results.
Whither Social Networks for Web Search?.
Rakesh Agrawal, Behzad Golshan and Evangelos Papalexakis.
Technical Report TR-2015-002.
Abstract:
Access to diverse perspectives is essential for inculcating and nurturing an informed citizenry. Google and Bing have emerged as the duopoly that largely arbitrates at least what 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 garnish different perspectives by probing 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, the users found those results to be quite informative in our user study. 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:
@techreport{AGP15:whither,
title={Whither Social Networks for Web Search?},
author={Rakesh Agrawal and Behzad Golshan and Evangelos Papalexakis},
number={TR-2015-002},
institution={Data Insights Laboratories},
address={San Jose, California},
month={February},
year={2015}
}