Research Article
Your Best might not be Good enough: Ranking in Collaborative Social Search Engines
@INPROCEEDINGS{10.4108/icst.collaboratecom.2011.247154, author={Henric Johnson and Prantik Bhattacharyya and S. Felix Wu and Jeff Rowe and Karen Haigh and Niklas Lavesson}, title={Your Best might not be Good enough: Ranking in Collaborative Social Search Engines}, proceedings={7th International Conference on Collaborative Computing: Networking, Applications and Worksharing}, publisher={IEEE}, proceedings_a={COLLABORATECOM}, year={2012}, month={4}, keywords={social networks search engine social search ranking}, doi={10.4108/icst.collaboratecom.2011.247154} }- Henric Johnson
Prantik Bhattacharyya
S. Felix Wu
Jeff Rowe
Karen Haigh
Niklas Lavesson
Year: 2012
Your Best might not be Good enough: Ranking in Collaborative Social Search Engines
COLLABORATECOM
ICST
DOI: 10.4108/icst.collaboratecom.2011.247154
Abstract
Abstract—A relevant feature of online social networks like Facebook is the scope for users to share external information from the web with their friends by sharing an URL. The phenomenon of sharing has bridged the web graph with the social network graph and the shared knowledge in ego networks has become a source for relevant information for an individual user, leading to the emergence of social search as a powerful tool for information retrieval. Consideration of the social context has become an essential factor in the process of ranking results in response to queries in social search engines. In this work, we present InfoSearch, a social search engine built over the Facebook platform, which lets users search for information based on what their friends have shared. We identify and implement three distinct ranking factors based on the number of mutual friends, social group membership, and time stamp of shared documents to rank results for user searches. We perform user studies based on the Facebook feeds of two authors to understand the impact of each ranking factor on the result for two queries.