SOCIAL MEDIA and INFORMATION RETRIEVAL

issues with finding people and ideas

www.geoffsharp.com

Current SNS have poor findability

• For example, some of the most valuable material is embedded in discussion, questions & answers, and comments

• However, search capability is limited to text search and some faceted searching, e.g. industry, country

• Examples of poor searching on Social Media include:o  Facebook - hard to find fellow trombone playerso Linkedin - Only very broad search on Q&Ao Twitter - Only text search

Search improved with the following

FEATURE

• Structured content like XML

• Separate Indexes for entities, e.g. Names, Dates, Metadata, geography, titles, authors

• Boolean retrieval, not just relevance ranked text search

BENEFIT

• Can segment entity fields in content

• Can create inverted indexes for these fields

• Can search on a combination of terms from titles, descriptors for improved precision