The Challenges and the Sciences of the Social Web Ricardo Baeza

The Challenges and the Sciences of the Social Web Ricardo Baeza

The Challenges and the Sciences
of the
Social Web
Ricardo Baeza-Yates
Yahoo! Research
Barcelona, Spain & Santiago, Chile
November 2006
© 2006 Yahoo!, Inc. 1
Why do people come online?
• To communicate
• To be informed
• To be entertained
• Increasingly… to be part of new forms of participation,
belonging and sharing
© 2006 Yahoo!, Inc. 2
A snapshot of Yahoo! today
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3.9 billion page views daily
News and information sites in 24 languages
250 million mail users
95 million groups members
7 million moderators
4 billion music videos streamed in 2005
7 billion song ratings
2 billion photos stored
© 2006 Yahoo!, Inc. 3
“One-way” Content
Film Clips
Competition
Critics
Picture Gallery
Community Content
User’s photos
User’s reviews
User knowledge
© 2006 Yahoo!, Inc. 4
© 2006 Yahoo!, Inc. 5
Simple acts create value and
opportunity
Using asystemof userassigned ratings, LAUNCHcast
builds up aprofile of
preferences for each individual..
Users can then share
their customradio
station with friends
through Yahoo!
Messenger
taking all the hassle
out of discovering new
music
© 2006 Yahoo!, Inc. 6
The more ratings users
make, the more
intelligent the radio
becomes.
We have over 6 billion
ratings
LAUNCHcast = music that
listens to you
Y! Search Vision – FUSE
Enrich people’s lives by enabling them to find, use, share
and expand all human knowledge
Find
Enable people to find what they are looking for
Use
Search to complete a task or achieve a purpose
Share
Expand
Sharing knowledge with people you connect with and
connecting to people who you share knowledge with
Leverage base of human knowledge to expand global repository
© 2006 Yahoo!, Inc. 7
The Changing Opportunity…
<A>
Source
Technology
Magnitude
Product
© 2006 Yahoo!, Inc. 8
Engineers
& Scientists
Webmasters
Community
Alpha Chip
Surfers
Link-Based Algorithms
Infrastructure Scale
Enabling Technologies
Right Incentives
Critical Mass
Thousands
of Newsgroups
Millions
of Web Sites
Usenet / Newsgroups Y! Directory / Altavista
Tens of Billions
of Web Docs
Google /
Inktomi
Trillions
of Knowledge Artifacts
Y! Answers /
Flickr
Agenda
• European search vision
Leader board
• Knowledge - the next challenge
• People power
• Making knowledge pay
Poorly formed questions
© 2006 Yahoo!, Inc. 9
No definitive
answer
Unverifiable
answer
Community consensus
© 2006 Yahoo!, Inc. 10
Where is the Science?
• Which questions are legitimate?
• What is the incentive system?
• How do we validate answers?
• What is the role of the community?
• What is the reputation system?
© 2006 Yahoo!, Inc. 11
Incentives
Legitimate?
© 2006 Yahoo!, Inc. 12
Validation
Community validation
© 2006 Yahoo!, Inc. 13
What are the challenges?
• Community of users
– Social system
• Incentives and reputations
– Economic system
• Poorly phrased, gramatically limited queries
– Language analysis
• Improving user experience from past data
– Data mining
© 2006 Yahoo!, Inc. 14
What are the sciences?
• Information retrieval and language processing
• Microeconomics
• Data Mining
• Sociology
• Community networks
© 2006 Yahoo!, Inc. 15
Where are the scientists?
• Yahoo! Research
– Barcelona
– SF Bay Area
– New York
– Los Angeles
– Santiago
© 2006 Yahoo!, Inc. 16
Yahoo! Research Mission
Vision:
Be the place that invents the Internet’s future
© 2006 Yahoo!, Inc. 17
Summary
• Yahoo! Research a warehouse for top scientific talent
• Scientists address the hardest problems at Yahoo!
• Strategic scientific insights combined with Tactical impact
© 2006 Yahoo!, Inc. 18