TWinner

In the present world scenario, where the search engines wars are becoming fiercer than ever, it becomes necessary for each search engine to realize the intent of the user query to be able to provide him with more relevant search results. Amongst the various categories of search queries, a major portion is constituted by those having news intent. Seeing the tremendous growth of social media users, the spatial-temporal nature of the media can prove to be a very useful tool to improve the search quality. In our work we examine the development of such a tool that combines social media in improving the quality of web search and predicting whether the user is looking for news or not. We go one step beyond the previous research by mining Twitter messages, assigning weights to them and determining keywords that can be added to the search query to act as pointers to the existing search engine algorithms suggesting to it that the user is looking for news. We conduct a series of experiments and show the impact that TWinner has on the results.