Bing Social SearchSean SuchterGeneral ManagerSearch Technology Center Silicon Valley

Why do search engines care?

Users expect to know right now

Did I just feel an earthquake?What’s going on with the Giants game?Is my cell network down?

ChallengesKeeping up with the speedMake sense of massive contentRelevance is still expected

2

Twitter (+ social media) contentTimely (but not always accurate!)Opinionated – feelings, reactions, impressionsBrief

Context is often essential to determine meaningWho said it, where, to whom

References - @user, #hashtag, RT, favorites, followsContent creation follows attention

Self-organized communities of attentionIf there’s no content, you can ask for some

Observable propagation of information

Use Case: Breaking Local NewsPower outage 8am on February 17, 2010 in Palo Alto

Out for everyone or just me?No media or online newsNo web search results (B, G, Y)Fast awareness through local social networkUseful public social search results in minutes

Meta-DataUrl referralsRetweet counts

Primary dataImagesTweet/Blog content

Low LatencyWithin minutes

Voice of the PeopleNon-official content

Publication Platforms

PublicCommunityPrivate

Publication

Pri

vate

Com

munit

yPublic

Acc

es

s

Facebook

Email

Answers

Web

Twit

ter

To rise above the noise, there is more to do as search gets more social

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Things you already do

Quality Anchor text

Trust Trust worthy sites linking to your site

Popularity

# of high quality links

Timeliness

Update your site, blogs

New things to consider

People retweeting what you said; sharing good links

Trust-worthy people sharing your links or tweets

# of people retweeting what you said in the last minute, hour, day

Be prepared to turn on a dime

Plus…

Topic / sentiment range, volume, trend analysis

What is the baseline rate of mentions / sentiment per unit time?

Look for changes in attention flow around a subject, location, topic

Watch for correlated signals from multiple sources

Consider source relevance and authority as well

Graph analysis for relevance and ranking

Naturally connected community (#smx)

Spam marketing campaign

(teeth whitening)Real time relevance needs data mining to filter and rank based on historySpammy communities can be highly visibleSocial graph, topic/concept graph, and behavior/gesture graphs are all useful tools

bing.com/twitter at a glance

Top Tweets

Top Shared Links

Top Tweets/Sentiment per

link

Adult / Spam filter; Tweets/Links ranking & relevance

Thank you