Incorporating social anchors for ad hoc retrieval

Anchor text has been widely used in web search as an effective complement to web page content. This motivates the investigation of similar sources of evidence about relevance. Social media postings often contain links to associated web pages, although typically not with anchor text. In this paper, we explore the use of these links and the text in the social postings as a form of anchor text (social anchors) for improving ad hoc search. Using a test collection based on ClueWeb09 together with associated social media, we show that by incorporating social anchor features, search effectiveness for “ad hoc” tasks can be significantly improved compared to state-of-the-art approaches. We also investigate the relative importance of social anchor features for retrieval, and show that query-dependent features are usually the key to better search performance.