New Conference on Web Search and Data Mining

Posted by Ziv Bar-Yossef and Kevin McCurley, Research Team

The pace of innovation on the World Wide Web continues unabated more than fifteen years after the first servers went live. The web was initially used by only a small community of scientists, but there are now over a billion people on the planet who use the web in their lives. The World Wide Web grows and changes as a young organism might, reflecting the social forces of the users and information producers. Each year seems to bring a radical new change, including the movement of commerce to the web, the availability of realtime news on the web, mobile users being able to access the web from anywhere, new forms of media such as video, and the emergence of blogs changing politics and publishing.

This rapid pace of innovation and scale presents many interesting research questions. At Google our goal is to organize information in ways that are useful to users, and we regularly find ourselves solving problems that seemed like ridiculous thought experiments just a few years ago. We therefore welcome the arrival of a new conference on Web Search and Data Mining, prosaically named with the acronym WSDM (pronounced as wisdom). WSDM is intended to be complementary to the World Wide Web Conference tracks in search and data mining. The soaring volume of submissions to these two tracks over the past few years justifies the foundation of a new top-tier conference on web search and mining. WSDM is a joint effort of researchers from the three large search engines (Google, Yahoo, MSN) as well as top-notch scientists from the Academia (such as Jon Kleinberg from Cornell, Rajeev Motwani from Stanford, and Monika Henzinger from Google and EPFL). The first WSDM conference will take place at Stanford University (the place where both Google and Yahoo! were conceived by their founders). The conference will be held in February of 2008, and the deadline for submissions is July 30, 2007. For further information see the WSDM web site. If you have good papers on search or data mining in the pipeline, please consider sending them to WSDM.

We look forward to seeing you there!