Detection of Breaking News from Online Web Search Queries

Many people enter queries to Google or Yahoo! in order to search useful information from the Web. Queries given to search engines can be regarded as the resources for detecting people’s information needs. It is often reported that many people perform search intensively after worldwide disasters or accidents. This paper describes a method for detecting such breaking news from search queries that are available online. In our method, real time search queries are obtained and filtered with news words extracted from a news site. Experimental results show that our method has abilities of detecting breaking news from more than 25 million search queries for six months.