We explore new ways of improving a search engine using data from Web 2.0 applications such as blogs and social bookmarks. This data contains entities such as documents, people and tags, and relationships between them. We propose a simple yet effective method, based on faceted search, that treats all entities in a unified manner: returning all of them (documents, people and tags) on every search, and allowing all of them to be used as search terms. We describe an implementation of such a social search engine on the intranet of a large enterprise, and present large-scale experiments which verify the validity of our approach.
['Einat Amitay', 'David Carmel', "Nadav Har'El", 'Shila Ofek-Koifman', 'Aya Soffer', 'Sivan Yogev', 'Nadav Golbandi']
Social search and discovery using a unified approach