Social Search Arnaud Fischer

Web 2.0 is about People Arnaud Fischer Friday, September 07, 2007

First, there was Broder’s connectivity map of the Web … we are trying to resolve USER intent, not so much content connectivity anymore …

Anthropology

It’s like every human being is a neuron, and humanity as a whole is one giant brain, smarter as a connected whole.

If you can increase the ability of humans to communicate with each other, to do something like the printing press, or the telephone, or the web, you make the whole planet smarter.

Naam

School Friendship Network

Friendship network of children in a US school. Vertices are color coded according to race. The split from top to bottom is between middle school and high school, i.e., between younger and older children.

http://www-personal.umich.edu/~mejn/networks/

Les Miserables

The network of interactions between major characters in the novel Les Miserables by Victor Hugo, divided in 11 communities represented by different colors.

FlickrLand

Network analysis of the Flickr population, based on data collected on March 14th, 2005.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/gustavog/sets/164006/

Exploring Enron

Using the Enron e-mail corpus, the interface--currently named "enronic"--unifies information visualization techniques with various algorithms for processing the e-mail corpus, including social network inference, message categorization, and community analysis.

http://jheer.org/enron/

The structure of adolescent romantic and sexual networks

This project describes the structure of an adolescent sexual network among a population of over 800 adolescents residing in a mid-sized town in the mid-western United States.

http://researchnews.osu.edu/archive/chainspix.htm

Vizster

Vizster is an interactive visualization tool for online social networks, allowing exploration of the community structure of social networking services such as friendster.com, tribe.net, and orkut.

http://jheer.org/vizster/

Flickr Graph

Flickr Graph is an application that explores the social relationships inside flickr.com.

http://www.marumushi.com/apps/flickrgraph/

Large-Scale Online Social Network Visualization

This image is a visualization of Jeffrey Heer's personal friendster network to 3 hops out, an online social network consisting of Jeffrey, his "friends", his friends' friends, and his friends' friends' friends.

http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~jheer/socialnet/

Physicists Co-Authorships

Network is a network of co-authorships between physicists who have published on topics related to networks. The figure shows only the largest component of the network, which contains 145 scientists.

Community Structure in Jazz

"We use the information available in the Red Hot Jazz Archive database in order to study the collaboration network between jazz musicians.

http://hermes.ffn.ub.es/~gleiser/id3.htm

Netscan

Usenet provides a fascinating sociological case study of online interaction for Marc Smith. As one of the most interesting social cyberspaces that have emerged through the Internet, Usenet is a place where cooperation should be hard, but cooperation happens there anyway and with an abundance and profusion that is remarkable.

http://mappa.mundi.net/maps/maps_019/#ref_2

BuddyZoo - AOL Instant Messenger analysis

BuddyZoo is a visualization analysis tool that maps AIM buddy lists. Users submit their AIM buddy lists to buddyzoo.com, and then the application runs all kinds of analysis on the data:

Find out which buddies they have in common with their friends.

Measure how popular they are.

Detect cliques they're part of.

See a visualization of their Buddy List.

View their Prestige, computed in a similar manner as Google's PageRank.

See the degrees of separation between different screen-names.

http://www.buddyzoo.com/

Social Network of Political Books

This is the third "social network" map of political books based on purchase patterns from major web book retailers.

http://www.orgnet.com/divided.html

flowerGarden

flowerGarden is an web-based software application, produced in Flash, for real-time social network and conversation visualization. It was used at the 3-day Bodies in Play summit in Banff, May 2005, at which the 50 participants were invited to input information about who they spoke to and what they discussed during the duration of the event.

http://www.gregjudelman.com/flowergarden.html

What is Social search

Definitions

Wikipedia

A social search engine is a type of search engine that determines the relevance of search results by considering the interactions or contributions of users.

Chris Sherman

Internet Wayfinding tools informed by human judgment – “Will be a very major trend”

Social search is about discovery and recommendation - by Greg Linden

There are two fundamental activities online -- Search and Browse. When a consumer knows exactly what she is looking for, she searches for it. But when she is not looking for anything specific, she browses. It is the browsing that holds the golden opportunity for a recommendation system, because the user is not focused on finding a specific thing -- she is open to suggestions.

Lots of attention and no good definition

Consensus …

Social search is information retrieval, wayfinding tools informed by human judgment.

People helping people find stuff, a derivative of asking friends and colleagues for recommendations.

Social search revolves around People networks, behaviors and personal content.

Judgment comes from Tags, click through activity, search history, bookmarking, CGM, …

Complements and does not replace algorithmic search

Social search is changing the rules, shifting power to the people

Why Social Search now?

First, there was …

On-the-page relevance

Off-the page relevance

Link authority

Community ranking

The Wisdom of crowds enhances Relevance.

This is the basis of a new flavor of social search where the community collectively builds the index of the search engine.

You pose the question and Yahoo’s community kicks into gear to provide the answers. These answers are aggregated and provide searchable content that make up Yahoo Answers.

Trends converge to social search

Social networking and consumer generated media

Openness revolution, syndication models and mashups

Web 2.0 user interaction models

Search is not solved (Jupiter)

41.2% of users report that general search results are often not directly relevant to queries.

32.5% of users report finding that there are too many results returned.

18% of users leave a search engine without having found the information they were seeking.

Why Social Search now?

Social search taxonomy attempt

Collaborative harvesting, tagging & directory building, social ranking

Sproose, Deciphero, Wink, Jookster, Wise , Collarity, ma.gnola, Gravee , Baidu , Blinklist , Woomp, Simpy, TagBulb , StumbleUpon, Eurekster , Yahoo! Suggestions, MSN Reporter, Digg , Netscape , Reddit , Tailrank , Prefound , Zimbio , Wikipedia , ODP, …