Web Search and Data Mining 2008

WSDM 2008 is happening this week at Stanford.

Erik Selberg has coverage of Hector Garcia Molina's keynote. It's a little vague (clearly a general outline), but Hector's priorities are interesting:

Hector's research priorities:

1. Beyond Search
2. Information Integration
3. Monetizing
4. Social Networking
5. Coping with Scale

I'm curious to learn the details of what he said, especially on "Beyond Search." Also, according to Erik, Hector dissed personalization, "He also doesn’t like Personalization, as he doesn’t like things that change." I'm sure Greg took him up on that challenge.

Here are few of my picks to read:

• Crawl Ordering by Search Impact (Pandy and Olston from Yahoo! Research)


• Beyond Basic Faceted Search (IBM Haifa)


• Fast Learning of Document Ranking Functions with the Committee Perceptron (CMU LTI)


• SoftRank: Optimizing Non-Smooth Rank Metrics (MSR Cambridge)


• An Experimental Comparison of Click Position-Bias Models (MSR Cambridge)


• Preferential Behavior in Online Groups(Yahoo! Research)


• Finding High-Quality Content in Social Media (Eugene Agichtein and Yahoo! Research)


• Can Social Bookmarking Improve Web Search? (Molina and others from Stanford)

There's a lot of quality papers to read. However, a small bit of writing advice for authors, please don't make your abstract a thirteen sentence long paragraph that takes the entire first column of your paper. If you can't be concise in summarizing your work, it's not worth my time to read it. If you ever catch me committing this type of writing offense, please, PLEASE, stop me. End rant.

Hopefully, I will have time to write up more detailed reviews of the papers later.