Discovering Irrelevance in the Blogosphere through Blog Search

Web 2.0 technologies have given birth to the blogosphere, which is an information sharing medium by the users for the users. Furthermore, these technologies have also expanded the search problem to a new form of search known as blog search. Similar to Web search, blog search has been affected by spam which affects the quality of search results. This paper approaches the relevant blog problem in the top search results against the general topic queries. It pursues a study of irrelevant blogs appearing in the top search results of Google Blog Search for the blog spot domains. We define metrics for irrelevant blogs by observing the qualitative relevance of content and by analyzing the link structure of those blogs. Our preliminary results show an overall recall of 0.875 with a precision of 1.0 for finding irrelevant blogs in the top 15 search results against six general topic queries on Google Blog Search.