The Metadata Triumvirate: Social Annotations, Anchor Texts and Search Queries

Abstract

In this paper, we study and compare three different but related types of metadata about Web documents: social annotations provided by readers of Web documents, hyperlink anchor text provided by authors of Web documents, and search queries of users trying to find Web documents. We introduce a large research data set called CABS120k, which we have created for this study from a variety of information sources such as AOL500k, the Open Directory Project, del.icio.us/Yahoo!, Google and the WWW in general. We use this data set to investigate several characteristics of said metadata including length, novelty, diversity, and similarity and discuss theoretical and practical implications.