Towards a Model of Understanding Social Search

Search engine researchers typically depict search as the solitary activity of an individual searcher. In contrast, results from our critical-incident survey of 150 users on Amazon's Mechanical Turk service suggest that social interactions play an important role throughout the search process. Ou...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:arXiv.org 2009-08
Main Authors: Evans, Brynn M, Chi, Ed H
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Electronic commerce
Information retrieval
Search engines
Search process
Search strategies
Social factors
Online Access:Get full text
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Summary:Search engine researchers typically depict search as the solitary activity of an individual searcher. In contrast, results from our critical-incident survey of 150 users on Amazon's Mechanical Turk service suggest that social interactions play an important role throughout the search process. Our main contribution is that we have integrated models from previous work in sensemaking and information seeking behavior to present a canonical social model of user activities before, during, and after search, suggesting where in the search process even implicitly shared information may be valuable to individual searchers.
ISSN:2331-8422