1. 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
Presented by Somin Kim

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

3. 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

4. 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

5. 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

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

7. 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 and the median was 159.5
The most popular applications were TweetDeck, Twitter, and Seesmic
87% experienced having searched a Twitter posts

8. 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

9. 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

10. 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

11. 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

12. 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

13. 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

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

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

16. 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

17. How People Search Twitter (6/10) Queries Issued
Specialized syntax @
As a Twitter used to refer to a user’s alias
In Twitter symbol usually appears at the beginning
In Web symbol usually appears as a part of an 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

18. 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

19. 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

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

21. 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

22. 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

23. 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

24. 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

25. 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

26. 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

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

28. 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

29. 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

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

31. 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