Adding Social Network Analysis to Search – iQuest

A few weeks ago I announced that I have become part of the iQuest Global team. I want to share some thoughts about the iQuest tool set in this post. The web today is about participation, among other things, and web search tools that are most effective take into consideration this participation, through some type of social network analysis, in delivering their results.

Google uses a form of social network analysis to enhance their search results. It measures your degree of “centrality” - how connected are you through its page rank approach. It looks at many things and keeps the algorithm secret to slow down those who want to cheat. One of the central factors in the reputation of the site measured through who links to you (and who links to them) and who do you link to, and how relevant is your content. However, it is relatively easy to cheat on this measure because of its very direct social network analysis. Google is always trying to monitor for cheaters as a result.

iQuest also uses a form of social network to enhance its search results. It measures the “betweenness centrality” - are you between important web sites - how important are the connections that passed through your site versus the whole web – and the key word in the search does not have to be on your site - it can be on the other sites that connect to and through yours. iQuest correlates well with Google but harder to spam because of the indirect social network measures.

Both tools return the appropriate sites for the search term with links to those sites. However, A big difference between the two occurs in the results displayed as iQuest also shows you the social network analysis. Google keeps theirs secret, likely to protect their measures from the cheaters.

iQuest is also different form most social network analysis because it looks inside the content of electronic communication and does simply look at the relationships between participants in this communication. This allows it to show you who are talking to whom, what they talk about, when they talk and where those conversations take place.

It also looks at relationship over time and provides “movies of the communication patterns over time. This allows you to see how relationships evolve the impact of temporal events on these relationships. This allows it to paint a graphic picture in real time of the relationships of people, ideas and organizations. In summary, iQuest marries termless search and social network mapping technologies to analyze structured, semi-structured and unstructured data.

You can find more about iQuest and see demos of its analysis at the iQuest Global site.