News Vertical Search: When and What to Display to Users

Mccreadie, R. , Macdonald, C. and Ounis, I. (2013) News Vertical Search: When and What to Display to Users. In: SIGIR 2013: 36th Annual ACM SIGIR Conference, Dublin, Ireland, 28th July - 1st August 2013,

Abstract

News reporting has seen a shift toward fast-paced online reporting in new sources such as social media. Web Search engines that support a news vertical have historically relied upon articles published by major newswire providers when serving news-related queries. In this paper, we investigate to what extent real-time content from newswire, blogs, Twitter and Wikipedia sources are useful to return to the user in the current fast-paced news search setting. In particular, we perform a detailed user study using the emerging medium of crowdsourcing to determine when and where integrating news-related content from these various sources can better serve the user's news need. We sampled approximately 300 news-related search queries using Google Trends and Bitly data in real-time for two time periods. For these queries, we have crowdsourced workers compare Web search rankings for each, with similar rankings integrating real-time news content from sources such as Twitter or the blogosphere. Our results show that users exhibited a preference for rankings integrating newswire articles for only half of our queries, indicating that relying solely on newswire providers for news-related content is now insufficient. Moreover, our results show that users preferred rankings that integrate tweets more often than those that integrate newswire articles, showing the potential of using social media to better serve news queries.

• Item Type: Conference Proceedings
• Status: Published
• Refereed: Yes
• Glasgow Author(s) Enlighten ID: Mccreadie, Dr Richard and Macdonald, Professor Craig and Ounis, Professor Iadh
• Authors: Mccreadie, R., Macdonald, C., and Ounis, I.
• Subjects: Q Science > QA Mathematics > QA75 Electronic computers. Computer science
• College/School: College of Science and Engineering > School of Computing Science