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 – Presentation Transcript

1. 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
2. What’s Real Time Search Good For, Anyway?
3. Twitter is Great for Watching Uninformed Panics Unfold Live
   …or finding balloons
   http://xkcd.com/574/
4. 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
5. 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
6. 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
7. Bing Twitter Search at a glance
   Top Tweets
   Top Shared Links
   Tweets/Sentiment per link
   Adult /Spam filter; Tweets/Links ranking & relevance
8. 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
9. 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
10. Graph analysis for relevance and ranking
    Spam marketing campaign
    Naturally connected community
    Spammy communities are highly visible – don’t be part of one!
11. Bing Twitter Maps Demo
12. To rise above the noise, there is more to do as search gets more social
    Plus…
13. Thank You
    Ho John Lee
    hojohn . lee @ microsoft.com
    twitter.com/hjl

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.