Information retrieval from social networks: A survey

Abstract

Social networks are becoming an integral part of people's life to share and disseminate information instantly. Users share their views on a particular topic or events and receive feedback from their followers, friends and colleagues in form of comments, like, dislike, upvote, downvote etc. Since the user has a very limited control on previously shared information and has limited storage space in his/her account, the management of users information is a very tedious task. In this paper, we discuss different types of social networking services and user's information shared on these services. We categorize the content based information into two categories namely textual content based information and visual content based information. Then we discuss the major efforts made for retrieval of these information from different social networks. We also outline a procedure for content based information retrieval from multiple social networks.