TwitterSearch : A Comparison of Microblog Search and Web Search Jaime Teevan, Daniel Ramage, Meredith Ringel Morris Microsoft Research, Stanford University, Microsoft Research WSDM’ 11 March 11 2011 Presented by Somin Kim

Outline Introduction Why People Search Twitter How People Search Twitter What People Find on Twitter Design Implications Conclusion

Introduction (1/3) Social networking service users share messages with their network of friends and with the general public One of the most popular social networking service is Twitter

Introduction (2/3) Tweets People use microblogging services like Twitter to share information Tweets News about the person posting Commentary on links Directed discussion Any other content … The poster’s current mood Location information

Microblogging content Introduction (3/3) People also use microblogging services to find information Some status updates are questions directed to user’s social connections Twitter provides a search interface to access public tweets Bing and Google have begun to provide online search of Twitter posts Different properties of contents on microblogging and web Microblogging content Web content Short Rich Generated frequently Generated more slowly Do not change after being posted Evolve after creation

Outline Introduction Why People Search Twitter Timely Information Social Information Topical Information How People Search Twitter What People Find on Twitter Design Implications Conclusion

Why People Search Twitter (1/4) We conducted a freeform questionnaire and had an structure interview to some Twitter users at Microsoft “When you search Twitter, what kind of information are you looking for?” Behavior of Twitter users at Microsoft The median time of using Twitter was 1~2 years 83% read tweets at least one time per day 59% wrote tweets at least one time per day The number of people followed was more than typical The mean was 370.4 and the median was 159.5 The most popular applications were TweetDeck, Twitter, and Seesmic 87% experienced having searched a Twitter posts

Why People Search Twitter (2/4) Timely Information Current events To keep up with what was happening To understand trends Ex. Information related to news ( technology news, trends ) Topics gaining popularity ( currently trending topic ) Summaries of events colleagues were attending ( event hashtags ) Real-time information Regional/local information ( police incident, weather, etc) Reports of traffic Status of online services

Why People Search Twitter (3/4) Social Information Information related to other Twitter users To find individuals with specific interests To discover what particular individuals were saying To understand the context of tweets that others wrote To look for replies General picture of people’s overall opinions on particular topic To learn the community buzz Ex. Movie reviews Marketing campaigns Upcoming Microsoft event or product

Why People Search Twitter (4/4) Topical Information Information related to specific topics It closely matched traditional Web search motivations It contain themes related to timely and social information Information previously encountered But it is difficult to re-find using Twitter search

Outline Introduction Why People Search Twitter How People Search Twitter Collecting Twitter and Web Queries Queries Issued Temporal Search Aspects of Search Behavior Common Cross-Corpus Queries What People Find on Twitter Design Implications Conclusion

How People Search Twitter (1/10) Collecting Twitter and Web Queries Query data issued to the Twitter search engine and Web search engine Sampled from the Web browser logs of the Bing toolbar from millions of users and includes hundreds of millions of page visits Collected during November 11 – 24 , 2009 The browser logs contain query URLs associated with multiple search engines It is possible to extract the queries issued to each engine from the URLs It is possible to associate the queries with user IDs and timestamps

How People Search Twitter (2/10) Collecting Twitter and Web Queries Twitter queries are from Twitter search engine, and Web queries are from Bing, Google, and Yahoo Some queries were treated as the same query instance Occurred within a fifteen minute In the same window To the same Web search engine With no other queries intervening

How People Search Twitter (3/10) Queries Issued Key differences between Twitter and Web query strings

How People Search Twitter (4/10) Queries Issued Web queries are navigational Twitter queries are temporally based or popular internet memes

How People Search Twitter (5/10) Queries Issued Celebrity Queries Celebrities were a popular topic among both Twitter and Web searches Celebrity queries issued to Twitter Significantly more likely to be a celebrity name Motivated by a desire for timely information Celebrity queries issued to Web Much more likely to include a celebrity name and additional content Motivated by a desire learn more about a particular aspect of some person

How People Search Twitter (6/10) Queries Issued Specialized syntax @ As a Twitter convention, @is used to refer to a user’s alias In Twitter queries, @ symbol usually appears at the beginning In Web queries, @ symbol usually appears as a part of an e-mail address @ in the body of the tweets(36%) is more common than that in Twitter queries # As a Twitter convention, # is used in hashtags, adopted self-tag posts In Twitter queries, # symbol usually appears at the start of a word In Web queries, # symbol usually represents the term “number” Many hashtags are compound words The words in Twitter queries(7.31 characters) are on average longer than Web query words(6.10 characters) @ and # can improve search success by reducing ambiguity

How People Search Twitter (7/10) Queries Issued Query popularity In general, Twitter queries are more consistent Searchers often issue queries on Twitter by clicking rather than typing Trending topic ( listed by the Twitter search box ) The use of hashtags encourages query convergence Popular Twitter queries are much more likely to contain a hashtag 50.73% of the 50 most popular Twitter queries contain a hashtag Timely queries are popular Only a limited set of topics are current at any one time Celebrity names are popular query 24.92% of the 50 most popular Twitter queries contain a celebrity name

How People Search Twitter (8/10) Temporal Aspects of Search Behavior Search sessions Twitter session behavior often appears to involve monitoring of tweets Overlapping but non-duplicate queries being more common with Web search Re-finding More repeat queries overall on Twitter than on Web In Web search, repeat queries often lead to re-finding For Twitter, people use repeat queries to monitor topics over time

How People Search Twitter (9/10) Common Cross-Corpus Queries Common queries are the queries issued to both services by the same individual

How People Search Twitter (10/10) Common Cross-Corpus Queries Common queries were usually a succinct representation of the common need Temporal aspects Common queries were more likely to be issued on the Web first Web search sessions were more likely to include related queries People issued common queries with roughly the same frequency on Twitter and Web

Outline Introduction Why People Search Twitter How People Search Twitter What People Find on Twitter Collecting Twitter and Web Results Language Differences in Results Design Implications Conclusion

What People Search Twitter (1/4) Collecting Twitter and Web Results Twitter content returned for the queries were crawled by Twitter’s spritzer stream for November 17-24, 2009 Twitter search results differ from Web search results Twitter search results are presented to the user in the result list To represent the Web search results, we extracted the title and summary text of the results For a better exploration of differences in Twitter and Web search results, very common and very rare terms were filtered from each query-specific results set

What People Search Twitter (2/4) Language Differences in Results The amount of information available following a query Average number of words In a Twitter results : 19.55 In the Web snippets : 33.95 Contents can be found via link Web snippets are associated with a Web page Only 34% of the Twitter results contain an external link Many common terms are shared, but there are differences in search results between Tweets and Web queries

What People Search Twitter (3/4) Language Differences in Results We used LDA’s per-document topic distributions Characteristics of topics on each corpora Common topics Information semantically related to the query Twitter topics Social chatter and current events Web topics Basic facts and navigational results

What People Search Twitter (4/4) Language Differences in Results The language of tweets is significantly different from that of the Web results Web results are more topically diverse than are tweets

Outline Introduction Why People Search Twitter How People Search Twitter What People Find on Twitter Design Implications Conclusion

Design Implications (1/2) To suggest for the design of next-generation search tools Enhancing temporal queries Enriching people search Not only return the recent tweets but also top links or top stories Incorporate more information into Twitter and Web result pages Leveraging hashtags Social tags manually added to some sites could be automatically supplemented with hashtags Employing user history There are many more repeat queries on Twitter, query history could be useful

Design Implications (2/2) To suggest for the design of next-generation search tools (cont.) Providing query disambiguation If a query-specific Twitter topic were popular, pages matching that topic could be ranked higher Tweets include questions could suggest additional information

Outline Introduction Why People Search Twitter How People Search Twitter What People Find on Twitter Design Implications Conclusion

Conclusion Twitter Search vs Web Search People’s motivation for searching Twitter included an interest in timely information, social information, and topical information Twitter queries were shorter, but contained longer words, more specialized syntax, and more references to people People often used Twitter search to monitor for new content while Web search was used to develop and learn about a topic Twitter results included more social content and events, while Web results contained more facts and navigation We hope this understanding enables a new generation of search tools