Temporal dynamics and information retrieval

Many digital resources, like the Web, are dynamic and ever-changing collections of information. However, most of the tools information retrieval and management that have been developed for interacting with Web content, such as browsers and search engines, focus on a single static snapshot of the information. In this talk, I will present analyses of how Web content changes over time, how people re-visit Web pages over time, and how re-visitation patterns are influenced by changes in user intent and content. These results have implications for many aspects of information retrieval and management including crawling, ranking and information extraction algorithms, result presentation, and evaluation. I will describe a prototype system that supports people in understanding how the information they interact with changes over time, and a new retrieval model that incorporates features about the temporal evolution of content to improve core ranking. Finally, I will conclude with an overview of some general challenges that need to be addressed to fully incorporate temporal dynamics in information retrieval and information management systems.