Estimating the Dissemination of Social and Mobile Search in Categories of Information Needs Using Websites as Proxies

TL;DR

This study investigates which types of information needs are inherently social and better suited for social media and mobile search, using website content categories and crowdsourced ratings to identify correlations.

Contribution

It introduces a methodology to analyze the social suitability of different content categories for information retrieval using websites as proxies.

Findings

Social information needs often do not require formal expertise.

Content areas like News and Lifestyle are more suited for social retrieval.

Some categories, such as Health, are less suited for social information seeking.

Abstract

With the increasing popularity of social means to satisfy information needs using Social Media (e.g., Social Media Question Asking, SMQA) or Social Information Retrieval approaches, this paper tries to identify types of information needs which are inherently social and therefore better suited for those techniques. We describe an experiment where prominent websites from various content categories are used to represent their respective content area and allow to correlate attributes of the content areas. The underlying assumption is that successful websites for focused content areas perfectly align with the information seekers' requirements when satisfying information needs in the respective content areas. Based on a manually collected dataset of URLs from websites covering a broad range of topics taken from Alexa (http://www.alexa.com} (retrieved 2015-11-04)) (a company that publishes statistics about web traffic), a crowdsourcing approach is employed to rate the information needs that could get solved by the respective URLs according to several dimensions (incl. sociality and mobility) to investigate possible correlations with other attributes. Our results suggest that information needs which do not require a certain formal expertise play an important role in social information retrieval and that some content areas are better suited for social information retrieval (e.g., Factual Knowledge & News, Games, Lifestyle) than others (e.g., Health & Lifestyle).