Applying Social Annotations to Retrieve and Re-rank Web Resources

Web-base tagging systems, which include social bookmarking systems such as del.icio.us, have become increasingly popular. These systems allow participants to annotate or tag web resources. This paper examined the use of social annotations to improve the quality of web search. It involved two components. First, social annotations were used to index resources. Two annotation-based indexing methods were proposed. Second, social annotations were used to improve search result ranking. Four annotation-based ranking methods were proposed. The result showed that using only annotation as an index of resources may not be appropriate. Since social annotations could be viewed as a high level concept of the content, combining them to the content of resource could add some more important concepts to the resources. The result also suggested that both static feature and similarity feature should be considered when using social annotations to re-rank search result.