13. A computer software product for use on a computer system, the computer software product comprising: a computer readable non-transitory storage medium, computer program code means stored on the computer readable non-transitory storage medium, the computer program code means comprising encoded instructions, wherein the encoded instructions comprise: providing access to the one or more text sources, each text source including one or more temporally-ordered data objects; obtaining or generating a search query based on one or more search tokens and one or more time intervals; obtaining or generating time data associated with the temporally-ordered data objects included in the one or more text sources; identifying one or more data objects related to the search query in the one or more text sources; generating one or more popularity curves based on frequency of the identified data objects corresponding to one or more of the search tokens in the one or more time intervals and the time data, the popularity curve exhibiting fluctuations of popularity over the one or more time intervals; identifying a burst in the one or more popularity curves, the burst occurring in one or more burst time intervals; identifying data objects related to the search query in the one or more burst time intervals as burst data objects; for each of the burst data objects, assigning an authoritative index to the each burst data objects, the authoritative index being computed from a frequency of content related to the search query contributed by an author of the each burst data object; ranking the burst data objects according to the authoritative index to obtain the top-i ranked burst data objects, i being an integer; and providing the top-i ranked burst data objects as authoritative data objects for user selection and viewing; wherein each data object comprises at least one of a blog, document, posting, article, email and message.
13. A computer software product for use on a computer system, the computer software product comprising: a computer readable non-transitory storage medium, computer program code means stored on the computer readable non-transitory storage medium, the computer program code means comprising encoded instructions, wherein the encoded instructions comprise: providing access to the one or more text sources, each text source including one or more temporally-ordered data objects; obtaining or generating a search query based on one or more search tokens and one or more time intervals; obtaining or generating time data associated with the temporally-ordered data objects included in the one or more text sources; identifying one or more data objects related to the search query in the one or more text sources; generating one or more popularity curves based on frequency of the identified data objects corresponding to one or more of the search tokens in the one or more time intervals and the time data, the popularity curve exhibiting fluctuations of popularity over the one or more time intervals; identifying a burst in the one or more popularity curves, the burst occurring in one or more burst time intervals; identifying data objects related to the search query in the one or more burst time intervals as burst data objects; for each of the burst data objects, assigning an authoritative index to the each burst data objects, the authoritative index being computed from a frequency of content related to the search query contributed by an author of the each burst data object; ranking the burst data objects according to the authoritative index to obtain the top-i ranked burst data objects, i being an integer; and providing the top-i ranked burst data objects as authoritative data objects for user selection and viewing; wherein each data object comprises at least one of a blog, document, posting, article, email and message. 21. The computer software product of claim 13 , wherein the authoritative index is further computed from a readability index assigned to the each burst data object.