Palanteer: A search engine for community generated microblogging data

Abstract

Unlike standard web search, people search microblog messages to look for temporally relevant information. Due to the recency nature of microblogs and a massive amount of data generated by users of popular services such as Twitter, it is challenging to design and implement a microblog retrieval system that satisfies the searcher and technical requirements. In this paper, we present a microblog search engine called Palanteer. Palanteer utilizes a unique framework for gathering and searching microblog data by focusing on harvesting community-relevant content. Next, Palanteer uses a timeline-based interface and a word cloud visualization to enable the searchers to explore and make sense of temporally-relevant information. The customizable framework can be used to create search engines for different community of users and microblogging sites. © 2012 Springer-Verlag.