Comments on Jeff's Search Engine Caffè: Twitter Releases Search+ Relevance based search

Many are focused on people (what ashton kutcher...

2011-06-08T10:45:03.715-04:00
Many are focused on people (what ashton kutcher is doing now...) and events like WWDC.

And so what is the open research question? Because it seems like if the focus is on @people and #events, then the @ and # solves 99% of the problem, does it not? e.g. a simple boolean match for a single word query @akutcher or #wwdc, with a little bit of stemming (#wwdc2011, #wwdc11) is all that is needed in order to satisfy what it is that people are actually doing with the system, correct? So if that is what the primary user need is, that actually means that not a lot needs to be done...

Or are you thinking more along the lines of user needs starting to appear, once capabilities appear? That adding search options will actually drive new and interesting user needs, instead of the other way around?

p.s.: I don't get broadcast television, but would still really like to see you on Fox. Any idea how I can do that?

Jeremy - thank you for the comments. There was a ...

2011-06-06T13:04:57.643-04:00
Jeremy - thank you for the comments. There was a recent paper by MSR on some analysis of twitters searches. Many are focused on people (what ashton kutcher is doing now...) and events like WWDC.

There's still a lot that needs to be done!

Daniel - I'll look into it. In the meantime, you can switch between search modes using the dropdown menu - instead of "top" select "all" in the UI. Let me know how that works.

Jeff, I tried Twitter search after the update and ...

2011-06-04T20:53:00.145-04:00
Jeff, I tried Twitter search after the update and have to say I find the filtering a bit unpredictable. One of my main use cases for Twitter is a vanity query, and I find that mentions return different results than a search for my user name -- and a search for a boolean expression that ORs my user name loses some of those results. Perhaps this is an undocumented feature, but at best it's confusing.

Would love to hear what you can share -- but of course I understand that you have limits there.

Remember our conversation at UMass back in 2008, i...

2011-06-02T08:57:33.188-04:00
Remember our conversation at UMass back in 2008, in which you were lamenting the state of traditional IR? You talked about how traditional IR focused on topical relevance, when what was really important nowadays was user relevance. Right?

What is your view of Twitter search with respect to user relevance? Is it meeting that goal? I'm not asking whether or not it is using ranking signals other than topical signals. Of course it is. It's using who you follow, who follows you, recent activity/popularity, etc. My question is whether those signals, and the algorithms that tie them together, are correctly oriented toward the appropriate Twitter searcher user model. In other words, what is a Twitter searcher really looking for, when they search? Are they looking for recent events? Are they looking for popular events? And is their information need precision-oriented (looking for that one, known-item, "best NDCG@3" tweet)? Or is it recall-oriented (looking for the best four dozens tweets, that all together tell a story of a conference, a natural disaster, etc.)?

In short, before you begin to design an algorithm to satisfy user relevance (rather than topical relevance), you have to understand what it is the user is actually trying to do. And I don't think I've ever seen a study on what Twitter searchers are actually trying to do, what sort of information they're trying to find, and why.

Do you know of any such studies?