TwitterRank: ReTweets as Search Quality Signal

Social Search Quality Signals
Real Time Quality Signals
Dan Zarrella
@DanZarrella
http://DanZarrella.com

The Problem
Web Search is Broken.

Web Search is Too Slow
Page to page links are too slow
Hours or days to be created
Days or weeks to be indexed
New Content takes hours or days to find

Social News Sites
Hours or days to produce a signal of high quality
Too small & niche

Social Networks
Facebook (et al) too closed for real API access
In-network/connection & scoping & privacy issues

The Solution
Twitter for Real Time Signals

ReTweeting is Link Sharing

New Content is Often ReTweeted

Possible Flaws
Not Even Twitter is Perfect

Rich Get Richer

Sock Puppet Accounts
79.79% failed to provide a homepage URL
75.86% of users have not entered a bio
68.68% have not specified a location
55.50% are not following anyone
54.88% have never tweeted
52.71% have no followers

The Algorithm
The Math

ReTweets-per-Follower (R0)
# of Tweets divided by the number of followers of those who tweeted it
RT/followers = R0

TweeterAuthority
Citation-style Authority
Mentions-per-Day = TweeterAuthority

Combined Metric
R0* Sum(TweeterAuthority of Users Who Tweeted)

Relevance Signal
The other words retweeted with a link
(Co-Occurrence with Link/RTs) / (Total Occurences/SampleSet)

Thank You!
Dan Zarrella
@DanZarrella
http://DanZarrella.com

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TwitterRank: ReTweets as Search Quality Signal

by Dan Zarrella on Oct 09, 2009

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TwitterRank: ReTweets as Search Quality Signal — Presentation Transcript