Information Retrieval on the Blogosphere

Published

July 30, 2012

Author(s)

Ian M. Soboroff, Rodrygo Santos, Craig Macdonald, Richard McCreadie, Iadh Ounis

Abstract

Blogs have recently emerged as a new open, rapidly evolving and reac- tive publishing medium on the Web. Rather than managed by a central entity, the content on the blogosphere—the collection of all blogs on the Web—is produced by millions of independent bloggers, who can write about virtually anything. This open publishing paradigm has led to a growing mass of user- generated content on the Web, which can vary tremendously both in format and quality when looked at in isolation, but which can also reveal interesting patterns when observed in aggre- gation. One field particularly interested in studying how information is produced, consumed and searched in the blogosphere is information retrieval. In this survey, we review the published literature on searching the blogosphere. In particular, we describe the phenomenon of blogging and the motivations for searching for information on blogs. We cover both the search tasks underlying blog searchers’ information needs and the most successful approaches to these tasks. These include blog post and full blog search tasks, as well as blog-aided search tasks, such as trend and market analysis. Finally, we also describe the publicly avail- able resources that support research on searching the blogosphere.

Citation

Foundations and Trends in Information Retrieval

Volume

6

Issue

1

Pub Type

Journals

Keywords

blog search, information retrieval evaluation, social media

Citation

Soboroff, I. , Santos, R. , Macdonald, C. , McCreadie, R. and Ounis, I. (2012), Information Retrieval on the Blogosphere, Foundations and Trends in Information Retrieval (Accessed January 24, 2026)