Combining Social Networking and Traditional Web Search

We are already waiting quite a while for Google (or Yahoo) to incorporate social networking technology into their web search services. Personalization of search results (as already being offered -- of course in some limited way) as a very first step towards the right direction has become part of traditional web search. The next step should include not only search results from personal resources but also from resources being available within your personal social network. Seems to be straight forward...?!

First thing, include all resources that I have tagged (you can also distinguish between resources that are yours and resources owned by others that you have tagged). In addition to the traditional hyperlink graph of the web (as it is used by the PageRank algorithm), new (weighted and labelled) arcs have to be inserted connecting your homepage (site/blog or whatever) with all the resources (own and foreign) that have been tagged by you.
Ok, now let's consider that everybody's tag-links are inserted into the hyperlink webgraph. Next thing is to insert (weighted and labelled) arcs from your homepage to the homepages of all your friends (according to your personal social network).
You will end up with a graph that includes (a) traditional hyperlinks, (b) personal tagged + weigthed links to resources, and (c) personal tagged + weigthed links to other users. This composite social webgraph should be sufficient for extending the traditional PageRank algorithm to include social networking information.
Of course (and I'm pretty sure of that and I don't go into details now) a lot of adjustments concerning the weights and the use of tags/labels for indexing have to be considered. But, I think it should be possible...

To some extend, a similar approach has been implemented by lijit. lijit is a personalized search engine that makes use of all your available social networking information. At registration, besides your homepage (or blog ... unfortunately you can not manage several different blogs) you pass over your username for several bookmarking/social networking services as well as the URLs of (a) content provided by you and (b) websites (blogs) of your friends. lijit creates a searchable webgraph covering all the resources and networking information that you have provided. Therefore, searching with lijit comes close to a rather personal variant of searching your very own web-universe.

Social Graph Based Search is also the topic of a video podcast from Scobleizer. Although I can't follow his argument that the social networking companies will kick Google's butt in four years (he states that Google's PageRank algorithm cannot be adapted to include social networking information...at least not in a way scalable for Google's purposes and also not with the current business modell of today's SEOs [=Search Engine Optimizers]), I agree to the way how to include social networking information into traditional web search.

SOFSEM - Day 4

Now we have snow....finally :) ...even a lot of it. It was snowing all day long, roads in Czech Republic and also in southern Germany were closed. Also Prague Airport was closed until the afternoon. But, I guess as far as I remember that are the more typical weather conditions for SOFSEM.
Anyway, the day started with a keynote of Tom Henziger about 'Games, Time, and Probability: Graph Models for System Design and Analysis'. He addressed three major sources of system complexity: concurrency, real time, and uncertainty. Concurrency can be modelled as a multi-player game representing a reactive system with potential collaborators and adversaries. Real time requires the system to combine discrete state changes as well as continous state evolution, while state changes - for uncertainty - also have to be modelled in a probabilistic way.
Unfortunately some of the presenters of the following contributed papers did not show up. Thus, the conference program was subject to several changes. In the afternoon the posters of the student research forum each had a short 5 minute presentation, followed by a poster exhibition and a lot of discussions. In the end, the participants should give a vote for the best poster presentation. My choice - which of course is completely subjective - was the poster of of Henning Fernau and Daniel Raible on 'Alliances in Graphs: a Complexity-Theoretic Study'.
In the late evening I was trying to look for my car, which was buried under the snow at the parking lot. Due to the wind the snow around the parking lot (and my car) was piled up almost half a meter...which made me think about the road conditions and the plan of driving home the next day....