as good as those using a standard
Web-based faceted navigation interface but with more bonhomie among
the collaborators.
social search: asking other People
Research suggests that much online
interaction on social sites is for the social experience of the interaction, rather than for problem-centric information seeking.
12 Reflecting this, a study
by Morris et al.
24 found the questions
asked of others via social networks do
not necessarily involve the kinds of information found on static Web pages.
Morris et al. asked survey respondents
to supply questions they had posed
to their social networks on Twitter
and Facebook, manually classifying
the 249 examples and finding only
17% were for factual information one
would typically seek from a Web page
(such as how to, say, put an Excel file
into LaTex). The most common categories were requests for recommendations (29%), opinions (22%), rhetorical
questions (14%), requests for others
to join social events (9%), favors (4%),
and social connections, including job
openings (3%) and offers of various
kinds (1%).
A study of the Aardvark expert
social-question-answering system
( http://www.vark.com) found similar
results, with 65% of a random sample
of 1,000 queries reflecting a subjective
attitude.
15 The questions asked on the
social-question-answering site Quora
also tend to be subjective and opinion-based; for instance, “What does Dustin
Moskovitz think of the new Facebook
movie?” was answered by the subject
of the question himself.
Unclear is what the best user inter-
faces are for representing this more
social kind of search. Freyne et al.
10
conducted a small study in which dif-
ferent kinds of social cues were shown
via icons alongside search-results list-
ings. Subjective results showed a posi-
tive preference toward cues showing
which articles were read frequently
or annotated by others. Yahoo experi-
mented (2005–2009) with the My Web
system in which search results were
augmented with an avatar of the per-
son in the user’s social network who
had recommended the page, along
with the recommendation. In March
2011, Google introduced a social-
search tool called “+ 1” with a similar
interface. Significant experimentation
on incorporating social information
into search results listings is likely
over the next few years.
social search: crowdsourcing
The word “collaboration” as it is used
here refers to a set of people working
together closely, usually synchronous-
ly, to achieve a goal. “Crowdsourcing”
refers to large groups of people not
necessarily working together knowing-
ly but each contributing in small ways,
leading to a greater whole, as seen, in,
for example, Wikipedia editing.
