The utility of tweeted URLs for web search

Microblogging as introduced by Twitter is becoming a source of tracking real-time news. Although identifying the highest quality or most useful posts or tweets from Twitter for breaking news is still an open problem, major web search engines seem convinced of the value of such posts and have already started allocating part of their search results pages to them. In this paper, we study a different aspect of the problem for a search engine: instead of the value of the posts, we study the value of the (shortened) URLs referenced in these posts. Our results indicate that unlike frequently bookmarked URLs, which are generally of high quality, frequently tweeted URLs tend to fall in two opposite categories: they are either high in quality, or they are spam. Identifying the quality category of a URL is not trivial, but the combination of characteristics can reveal some trends.