Although real time search is fairly new, as we end 2009, the ability to index and search fresh results is rapidly becoming a commodity, with Bing, various startups, and now Google all integrating status feeds from social networking services. The next set of challenges in 2010 will be around providing better relevance, information discovery, and topic exploration for social search, using signals from the dynamic behavior of users and their interaction with the social and topic graphs.
I gave a short talk on real time and social search for a panel at SES Chicago last week. I’ve been heads down for the past few months working on Bing Twitter Search, so now that the first launch is out the door it was a nice chance to talk with people about some of the work we’re doing. There was a lot of interest in the sentiment, trend, and social graph analysis slides (9 and 10). I will write about those in a separate post, but wanted to get the presentation up for those who have been asking about it.
What’s Different about Real Time and Social Search – HJL Slides For SES Chicago Dec 09
View more presentations from Ho John Lee.
What’s Different about Real Time and Social Search – HJL Slides For SES Chicago Dec 09 – Presentation Transcript
- What’s different about real time and social search?
Ho John Lee
Principal Program Manager
Bing Social Search
Search Engine Strategies
Chicago – December 7, 2009 - What’s Real Time Search Good For, Anyway?
- Twitter is Great for Watching Uninformed Panics Unfold Live
…or finding balloons
http://xkcd.com/574/ - Some characteristics of Twitter / Social media
Immediacy, Sentiment, Brevity
Not always accurate
Feelings, reactions, impressions
Context is often essential to determine meaning
Gestural – @user, #hashtag, RT, favorites, follows
Self-organizing communities of attention and authority
Content follows attention
People talk about what others are talking about
Observations and commentary from everywhere
If there’s no content, you can ask for some
Extreme head and tail coverage
Low relevance “noise” can become “signal” in aggregate - Your product or brand could suddenly be at the center of a huge conversation
Tiger Woods
Balloon Boy
Breaking Story
Persistent Story
Big Story
Bigger Story - Some characteristics of Real time / Social Search
- Real time and social search is qualitatively different from traditional web search
- Differences in ranking, relevance, use model
- Social graph, user behavior, location, event correlation and other input signals
- Real time search is frequently about discovery, not search per se
- “what is everyone talking about”, followed by “what are people saying about ”
- Top real time and social search results will usually differ from top web search results
- Bing Twitter Search at a glance
Top Tweets
Top Shared Links
Tweets/Sentiment per link
Adult /Spam filter; Tweets/Links ranking & relevance - Bing Fall 2009: Twitter vertical, News, MSN, Maps
MSN Local Edition
Page 2: Tweets or Links
Page 1: Tweets & Links
Twitter Answer on News SERP
MSN Hot Topics - Topic / sentiment range, volume, trend analysis
What is the baseline rate of mentions / sentiment per unit time?
Changes in attention flow around a subject, location, topic
Watch for correlated signals from multiple sources
Consider source relevance and authority as well - Graph analysis for relevance and ranking
Spam marketing campaign
Naturally connected community
Spammy communities are highly visible – don’t be part of one! - Bing Twitter Maps Demo
- To rise above the noise, there is more to do as search gets more social
Plus… - Thank You
Ho John Lee
hojohn . lee @ microsoft.com
twitter.com/hjl
Here’s a writeup on the real-time session from aimClear, which includes a Batman-camera-angle photo of me.
The session was moderated by Barbara Coll, CEO, WebMama.com Inc., with panelists Bill Fischer, Co-Founder & Director, Workdigital, Ltd., Rob Walk, Managing Partner, NovaRising, Nathan Stoll, Co-Founder, Aardvark, and Ho John Lee, Principal Program Manager, Social and Real Time Search, Microsoft Bing.
