YouRank: Let User Engagement Rank Microblog Search Results

We propose an approach for ranking microblog search results. The basic idea is to leverage user engagement for the purpose of ranking: if a microblog post received many retweets/replies, this means users find it important and it should be ranked higher. However, simply applying the raw count of engagement may bias the ranking by favoring posts from celebrity users whose posts generally receive a disproportionate amount of engagement regardless of the contents of posts. To reduce this bias, we propose a variety of time window-based outlier features that transfer the raw engagement count into an importance score, on a per user basis. The evaluation on five real-world datasets confirms that the proposed approach can be used to improve microblog search.