Towards a Model of Understanding Social Search

TL;DR

This paper proposes a social model of search that incorporates social interactions and shared information throughout the search process, challenging the traditional view of search as an individual activity.

Contribution

It integrates sensemaking and information seeking models to present a comprehensive social framework for understanding search behaviors.

Findings

Social interactions influence search activities at all stages.

Users benefit from shared information even when not explicitly shared.

Empirical survey data supports the importance of social aspects in search.

Abstract

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.