Confucius and Its Intelligent Disciples: Integrating Social with Search

Edward Y. Chang
Zoltan Gyongyi
Maosong Sun
Proceedings of VLDB 2010, 36th International Conference on Very Large Data Bases, VLDB Endowment, pp. 1505-1516

Abstract

Q&A sites continue to flourish as a large number of users rely on them as useful substitutes for incomplete or missing search results. In this paper, we present our experience with developing Confucius, a Google Q&A service launched in 21 countries and four languages by the end of 2009. Confucius employs six data mining subroutines to harness synergy between web search and social networks. We present these subroutines’ design goals, algorithms, and their effects on service quality. We also describe techniques for and experience with scaling the subroutines to mine massive data sets.