Information Sciences and Technology faculty members Lee Giles and Luke Zhang and their students recently introduced SNDocRank, a framework to incorporate social networks into multimedia search rankings.
“With the assumption that ‘birds of a feather flock together,’ the SNDocRank framework ranks the videos based on the similarity of the owners of videos in social networks,” Giles said. “Users tend to be friends if they have common interests, and they are more interested in their friends’ information than that of others they don’t know.”
For example, if a user wants to find a video about a friend whose name happens to be the same as a celebrity, it is likely that the search results returned will focus on the celebrity. However, if the videos are searched within the user’s social networks, the friend’s information -- not the celebrity’s -- will most likely rank higher in search results
Giles and Zhang discovered that their method of ranking was comparable to PageRank (used by Google) but different in that the results produced were more likely to satisfy a searcher. They also suggest their results can depend upon your location within a social network.
“With social network ranking, where you are in the social network matters and your results from a search reflect that,” Giles said.
This means that rankings are loosely based on how many friends you have, what groups you join, and what subscriptions you have.
The paper “SNDocRank” A Social Network-Based Video Search Ranking Framework,” was presented at the 2010 ACM SIGMM International Conference on Multimedia Retrieval, held March 29-31 in Philadelphia.
The Abstract and Full Text of the Paper is Available via the ACM ePortal.
Note:
If you've been reading/reviewing/scanning ResourceShelf for some time you know we're big time admirers of the work of Lee Giles at Penn St. University. Included in his long list of writings, awards, and accomplishments was as one of the primary developers of the better than ever topic focused (some might call it a niche search tool) Citeseer database that is now named CiteseerX) while working at NEC Research. It crawls the open web and autonomously locates and often provides one-click access to the full text of scholarly papers in computer science, telecommunications, and several related areas. He also runs ChemxSeer Project at Penn State.
While Google Scholar's work is impressive and worth of admiration, so is CiteseerX and other searchable databases from Lee Giles and his colleagues. Several are mentioned in his bio. Citeseer and CiteseerX have been available online (free) since the mid to late 1990's.
Btw, we've recently mentioned the exciting work being done at Microsoft Research Asia with their Microsoft Academic Search (this is not the same as the one time and very poor Live Academic Search).
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