Searching The Social Web

Searching the Social Web The Challenges of Socially-Connected Search IR Leadership Seminar 2008 / Ofer Egozi

The problem… What to choose? Whom to trust??...

… The solution? What to choose? Whom to trust??...

Leveraging the Social Graph in web search
Focused crawling
Personalized ranking
Delver is a first-mover
The solution? Socially- connected search: What to choose? Who to trust??...

Trusted results
Friends qualify content/sources
Potential contact in reach
Spam is inherently low
Reasoning over results
Ranking is transparent
Easier to assess relevance
Network discovery
Experts in my network
Serendipity
The solution? Socially- connected search: What to choose? Who to trust??...

Outline
Approaches to Social Search
The Social Graph
Graph-Related Challenges
Search-Related Challenges

Humans in the loop
Search = crawl + index + rank + query
Crawling (Dmoz, Mahalo)
Indexing (del.icio.us, Flickr)
Querying (ChaCha)
Ranking – that’s what we’ll discuss…

A Taxonomy of Social Search Aggregated Personalized Network-based Behavior- based ? ?

The Social Graph
A directed, cyclic graph
Nodes are people (identities)
Edges are relations between them
Large portion is public on social networks
A lot isn’t – cellular, email, non-digital
Emerging web standards
OpenID/hCard – identifier/identity
Contact APIs/PoCo/XFN – private/public contact lists
FB Connect – a full proprietary framework

Social Graph in Research
Extraction from interactions
Email (Van Alstyne et al. 2003), Chat (Tuulos & Tirri 2004), IM (Lang 2004)
Correlation with “physical”
Bluetooth contact (Mtibaa et al. 2008)
Security and Privacy
Shared knowledge authentication (Toomim et al. 2008)
Graph link privacy (Xu 2008), (Korolova et al. 2008)
Enhance IR ranking
Index friends browse history (Mislove et al. 2006)
Rank by author centrality (Kirchhoff et al. 2008)
Rerank by sampling network click-log (Das et al. 2008)

So first we need to draw the graph…

Social Graph - challenges
Social graph nodes
Identities/relations across networks
Joe friend-of follows friend-of follows Joe JJ123 Joey

Social Graph - challenges
Social graph nodes
Identities/relations across networks
Identity impersonation
Non-individual identities (groups, shared authorship…)
Privacy is an issue, even with public data
Social graph edges
Relation “strength” not exposed
Super nodes may dominate results
“ Politeness” relations are not filtered out
Automatic generation – double-edged sword
Joe friend-of follows friend-of follows Joe JJ123 Joey

So now we’ve mapped the social graph… … and attached each node with its content…

… can we finally go fetch?

S-C Search - challenges
Must build a search engine…
Store graph, attach content to nodes
Reranking will not do, this is the long tail

Not in Google’s / Yahoo!’s top-1000!… (dominated by authorities)

S-C Search - challenges
Must build a search engine…
Store graph, attach content to nodes
Reranking will not do, this is the long tail
Scale well, including graph functions
Personalized graph-based rank
Integrate content-based with static ranking
Use web graph structure, like PageRank etc.
Network is egocentric , unlike PageRank

Socially-Connected Search
What are the enablers?
Social networks
Users’ content boom
What can be achieved?
Search-based access to network content
Trusted and transparent social ranking
What are the challenges?
Fragmented social graph
Personal-network ranking
Thank you! http://www.delver.com

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Searching The Social Web

by Ofer Egozi on Dec 16, 2008

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Searching The Social Web — Presentation Transcript