Social, temporal & topical search queries —The main motivations behind microblog search

Before defining what are the relevance features that characterize microblogs, it is primordial to determine what are the factors that motivate user search within microblogs. Related to this context, Broder (2002) and  Manning et al. (2008)  identified three types of search queries that reflect search motivations on the web namely, navigational, informational and transactional queries.

What is Twitter? a practical example from US presidential election 2012

Launched in March 2006, Twitter provides innovative features in comparison to other social networking Web sites and microblogging services. A microblog, known as “tweet” in Twitter parlance, is a plain text blog with up to 140 characters. This format ensures microblogs compatibility with other services such as mobile applications and Short Message Service (SMS). The Twitter social network is based on the principle of followership. A microblogger may follow other ones, known as  “friend” or “following”, and followed in his turn by someone else, known as “follower”.

#Ukraine invaded by #Russia hashtag! Events and vocabulary change on Twitter

Event’s trend on Twitter keep changing and evolving over the time with respect of the real world event. This evolution impacts the used vocabulary in related tweets. A good example about political changes in Ukraine (March, 2014) may illustrate the change of vocabulary across the time.

Detecting and tracking events on Twitter for an insight and unbiased view

Event detection and tracking system aims to identify real-world events from Twitter stream and track their evolution on real time. Large-scale events like earthquake, army conflicts or sport competitions influence a large number of twitterers who show a great motivation to report fresh news. In contrast of traditional media, news from social media are instant, incremental and interactive. Interestingly, updates which sent from the event’s site provide an insight and unbiased view about the event.

Searching in microblogs is about social and real-time information seeking

Microblogs stand as promising tool where users can find recent information published by other users. These social networking websites are distinguished by information diversity as well as the intensive social interaction within. People can in fact tag, in real-time, their blogs, post comments, and share further resources such as photos, videos and Web pages. This information is usually not yet indexed and thus not available via classical search engines.

From document focused retrieval to social enhanced search in digital libraries

Scientific publications and reviews were used as reference collections in first information retrieval systems (Salton, 1991). Retrieval models that were tested primarily on scientific collections have been integrated within digital libraries. These models assimilate relevance to the textual similarly between document and query. However, relevance in literature retrieval context does not depend only on topical similarity and may involve other criterions related to documents.

Professional metadata is not more effective! Towards social and collaborative retrieval in digital libraries

Digital libraries usually provide professional metadata about articles such as general subjects and keywords. However, this metadata is not more effective for literature search than user-generated content provided by social networking services (Koolen el al, 2012).