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. 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 both explicitly and implicitly shared information may be valuable to individual searchers. ACM Classification Keywords H.5.3 Information Systems: Group and Organization Interfaces--theory and models, collaborative computing, webbased interaction.; H.3.3 Information Storage and Retrieval: Information Search and Retrieval--Search process. Author Keywords Social search, social navigation, information seeking, sensemaking, web browsing.

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2008
• Where: CIKM
• Authors: Brynn M. Evans, Ed H. Chi
• Keywords: CIKM 2008, Individual Searchers, Information Management, Search Engine Researchers, Search Process