Real-time social media retrieval with spatial, temporal and social constraints

Search in social network is continuously being expanded to enhance user experience. Besides basic textual retrieval, users can also search based on features such as spatial proximity, temporal freshness and/or social closeness. To efficiently process each advanced query type, customized indexing mechanisms have been developed. However, such mechanisms only perform well for the query types that they were designed for; moreover, they are not readily adaptable to support other query types. In this paper, we propose an interval-at-a-time (IAAT) framework as a first attempt to provide a one-size-fits-all solution to social media retrieval with spatial, temporal and social constraints. In addition, the algorithm relies on inverted index only, which makes it compatible with conventional search engines. The inverted lists are sorted by document id and the insertion is very fast because only append operation is involved. Experiments conducted on two large-scale Twitter datasets show that though IAAT is a unified strategy, it performs better than most of the state-of-the-art customized solutions in a variety of query types.