People Search Engines.ppt

People Search Engines Ingmar Weber Email: ... find it via http://scifi.epfl.ch Joint work with Adish Singla Demo of people search engines Google address search (US only) Intelius background check (US only) Who’s who (25,000 big guys only) Business web (linkedin, xing, certain websites) Social networks++ (myspace, friendster, wikipedia, xanga, …) User contributed (tags, wikipedia, user added) Database community (VLDB, SIGMOD, CIDR, ..) More: spock, pipl, isihighlycited, csbib, scirus, … A “Scientist Finder” (SciFi) Why I work on this: I simply enjoy building (working) systems Good to stay in touch with Web 2.0 and all that Interesting to do (simple) web mining A good way to improve “visibility” Part of a bigger plan … Outline Starting point Why to search for a person Why/how is people search different Efficiency How long are users willing to wait How to make things (reasonably) efficient Result Quality What makes our life easy What makes our life hard Concrete Examples Case 1: Finding a good picture Case 2: Finding the (approximate) birth year Software Design Things we got right Things we’d get right next time Why to search for a person? Vanity “Digital mirror” Who is he/she? Search for unknown author Contact information (email) address Devoted fan “britney spears” It’s fun Does the machine “know” your friends? Why is people search different? What goes in (different sources) social networks, phone books, personal homepages What comes out (fact extraction) address, age, photo, homepage url What goes down (unforgiving users) facts are either wrong or right, wrong picture is “major disaster”, offended by age or # publications How long will users wait? It depends on the setting Information retrieval without feedback About 2 seconds are still tolerable Information retrieval with feedback Up to about 15 seconds is ok “A study on tolerable waiting time: how long are web users willing to wait?”, Fiona Fui-Hoon Nah, Journal of Behavior Information Technology, 2004, vol