google yourself! measuring the performance of personalized information resources (aoir 2008)
DESCRIPTION
Paper presented at the Association of Internet Researchers conference (Copenhagen, 15-19 Oct. 2008)TRANSCRIPT
Yourself!
Measuring the Performance of Personalized Information Resources
A.o.I.R. 9.0 [Thomas Nicolai, Lars Kirchhoff, Axel Bruns, Jason Wilson, Barry Saunders]
Google Yourself! Measuring the Performance of personalized Information Resources
Exponential growth of social media applications on the Web
People started publishing personal information about themselves on the Web
People started actively monitoring and shaping their online image
Started tracking personal and related information via search engines
A.o.I.R. 9.0 [Thomas Nicolai, Lars Kirchhoff, Axel Bruns, Jason Wilson, Barry Saunders]
Google Yourself! Defined
Theory of narcissism can be used to explain the phenomenon
Distinguishing between a clinical and a cultural narcissism
Cultural narcissism is based on the hypothesis that narcistic behaviour is a highly common personality characteristic found in all modern society
Raskin et al. found evidence that narcistic behaviour has increased by more than 30 percent between 1982 and 2006
A.o.I.R. 9.0 [Thomas Nicolai, Lars Kirchhoff, Axel Bruns, Jason Wilson, Barry Saunders]
Google Yourself! Defined
Self-googling can be defined as a self-focused concentration of the attention of an individual to themself by actively monitoring and shaping their persona and perception online
A.o.I.R. 9.0 [Thomas Nicolai, Lars Kirchhoff, Axel Bruns, Jason Wilson, Barry Saunders]
Google Yourself! Research Questions
(1) To what extend is the self-googling visible in the usage of search engines?
(2) Is any significant difference measurable between queries related to self-googling, and generic search queries?
(3) To what extend do self-googling search requests match the selected personalised web pages?
A.o.I.R. 9.0 [Thomas Nicolai, Lars Kirchhoff, Axel Bruns, Jason Wilson, Barry Saunders]
Google Yourself! Research Methodology
Analysis of search engine usage by online users
2.46 million search engine requests extracted from a set of 100 million log file entries
Time period of 14 months
In-depth analysis of the search terms used and search results clicked on
A.o.I.R. 9.0 [Thomas Nicolai, Lars Kirchhoff, Axel Bruns, Jason Wilson, Barry Saunders]
Google Yourself! Research Methodology
Analysis of search and click-through trends for (I) personalised information resources and (II) non-personalised information resources
measurement
Sergey Brin
A.o.I.R. 9.0 [Thomas Nicolai, Lars Kirchhoff, Axel Bruns, Jason Wilson, Barry Saunders]
Google Yourself! Research Methodology
Creation of 7 million personalised web pages and 20 million non-personalised web pages
Web pages indexed by Google search engine
Analysis of search engine referrer from Google
A.o.I.R. 9.0 [Thomas Nicolai, Lars Kirchhoff, Axel Bruns, Jason Wilson, Barry Saunders]
Google Yourself! Personalized Web Page
A.o.I.R. 9.0 [Thomas Nicolai, Lars Kirchhoff, Axel Bruns, Jason Wilson, Barry Saunders]
Google Yourself! Non-Personalized Web Page
A.o.I.R. 9.0 [Thomas Nicolai, Lars Kirchhoff, Axel Bruns, Jason Wilson, Barry Saunders]
Google Yourself! Personalised Web Pages
A.o.I.R. 9.0 [Thomas Nicolai, Lars Kirchhoff, Axel Bruns, Jason Wilson, Barry Saunders]
Google Yourself! Non-Personalised Web Pages
A.o.I.R. 9.0 [Thomas Nicolai, Lars Kirchhoff, Axel Bruns, Jason Wilson, Barry Saunders]
Google Yourself! Non-Personalised vs. Personalised
Google Referrer Distribution
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ferrer
Authors Publications Unspecified
A.o.I.R. 9.0 [Thomas Nicolai, Lars Kirchhoff, Axel Bruns, Jason Wilson, Barry Saunders]
Google Yourself! Search Term Similarity for personalised URIs
Similarity between Google search terms and personalized URI's
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1 3 5 7 9 11 13 15 17 19 21 23 25 27 29 31 33 35 37 39 41 43 45 47 49 51 53 55 57 59 61 63 65 67 69 71 73 75 77 79 81 83 85 87 89 91 93 95 97 99
Percent
# re
ferrer
A.o.I.R. 9.0 [Thomas Nicolai, Lars Kirchhoff, Axel Bruns, Jason Wilson, Barry Saunders]
Google Yourself! Research Results
Correlation in the quality of matches between personalised search queries and selected hyperlinks (URI paths)
More than 0.3 million referrals show matching score of 100 percent, out of 1.66 million search engine referrals for personalised web pages
Very high quality of interaction with personalised web pages
Average of everyday search queries provides an equivalent quality score of 64.74 percent
A.o.I.R. 9.0 [Thomas Nicolai, Lars Kirchhoff, Axel Bruns, Jason Wilson, Barry Saunders]
Google Yourself! Limitations
Problem to separate between people-googling and self-googling requests using our methodology
Only a combination of quantitative and qualitative approaches can reliably separate these two types
A.o.I.R. 9.0 [Thomas Nicolai, Lars Kirchhoff, Axel Bruns, Jason Wilson, Barry Saunders]
Google Yourself! Conclusion
Personalised web pages are twice as popular as generic web pages and still growing
Rise of narcissism as a cultural entity in society may explain in part the evolution of social media services, and vice versa
Some evidence that a growing narcissism, related to the rise of social media, is visible in the self-googling phenomenon
WWW is transforming itself from a web of documents and hyperlinks into a web of social relationships
A.o.I.R. 9.0 [Thomas Nicolai, Lars Kirchhoff, Axel Bruns, Jason Wilson, Barry Saunders]
Google Yourself!
Questions?