#TwitterSearch

Jaime Teevan, Daniel Ramage, Merredith Ringel Morris
2011 Proceedings of the fourth ACM international conference on Web search and data mining - WSDM '11  
Social networking Web sites are not just places to maintain relationships; they can also be valuable information sources. However, little is known about how and why people search socially-generated content. In this paper we explore search behavior on the popular microblogging/social networking site Twitter. Using analysis of large-scale query logs and supplemental qualitative data, we observe that people search Twitter to find temporally relevant information (e.g., breaking news, real-time
more » ... nt, and popular trends) and information related to people (e.g., content directed at the searcher, information about people of interest, and general sentiment and opinion). Twitter queries are shorter, more popular, and less likely to evolve as part of a session than Web queries. It appears people repeat Twitter queries to monitor the associated search results, while changing and developing Web queries to learn about a topic. The results returned from the different corpora support these different uses, with Twitter results including more social chatter and social events, and Web results containing more basic facts and navigational content. We discuss the implications of these findings for the design of next-generation Web search tools that incorporate social media.
doi:10.1145/1935826.1935842 dblp:conf/wsdm/TeevanRM11 fatcat:w6ohwjr4dnhtbl3wrfhdt73haa