Can Social Bookmarking Enhance Search in the Web?

Social bookmarking is an emerging type of a Web service that helps users share, classify, and discover interesting resources. In this paper, we explore the concept of an enhanced search, in which data from social bookmarking systems is exploited for enhancing search in the Web. We propose combining the widely used link-based ranking metric with the one derived using social bookmarking data. First, this increases the precision of a standard link-based search by incorporating popularity estimates from aggregated data of bookmarking users. Second, it provides an opportunity for extending the search capabilities of existing search engines. Individual contributions of bookmarking users as well as the general statistics of their activities are used here for a new kind of a complex search where contextual, temporal or sentiment-related information is used. We investigate the usefulness of social bookmarking systems for the purpose of enhancing Web search through a series of experiments done on datasets obtained from social bookmarking systems. Next, we show the prototype system that implements the proposed approach and we present some preliminary results.