Khalid El-Arini et al Turning Down the Noise in the Blogosphere

This a Paper discussed in Social Media Analysis 10-802 in Spring 2010.

Summary

This is paper is related to Cost Effective Outbreak Detection in Networks and extends the use of Submodularity in order to provide accurate search results of the Blogosphere.

The original use of submodular cost functions applied to the Blogosphere was to determine which blogs provided the best ability to capture information cascades. That is, which blogs should someone read if they were concerned about staying the most up-to-date or which ones they should read in order to ensure they missed as little breaking news as possible.

This paper uses the same method in order to customize search results. They compare their results using metrics of topicality and redundancy with search results provided from other engines such as Google or Yahoo.