Calculating expertise confidence based on content and social proximity

A method, comprising:

• executing a document-oriented search based on a query in an index of documents to generate a set of document results, at least one of the documents associated with at least one potential expert;
• analyzing the document results to produce a list of potential experts;
• calculating an expertise score for at least one of the potential experts based on a content score and a metadata score for the at least one of the potential experts;
• calculating, using a processor, a confidence score for the at least one of the potential experts based on a diversity-constrained content score and a diversity-constrained metadata score for the at least one of the potential experts, the diversity-constrained content score and the diversity-constrained metadata score calculated using an evidence diversity score for the at least one of the potential experts, wherein the diversity-constrained content score is calculated based on a threshold number of different content document types and associations, the content document types and associations gathered by parsing websites and stored in a data repository;
• and
• sending a list of experts with associated confidence scores that are above a confidence score threshold to a client device.