Around the Water Cooler: Shared Discussion Topics and Contact Closeness in Social Search
Venue
Proceedings of the Sixth International AAAI Conference on Weblogs and Social Media (ICWSM-12), ACM (2012)
Publication Year
2012
Authors
Saranga Komanduri, Lujun Fang, David Huffaker, Jessica Staddon
BibTeX
Abstract
Search engines are now augmenting search results with social annotations, i.e.,
endorsements from users’ social network contacts. However, there is currently a
dearth of published research on the effects of these annotations on user choice.
This work investigates two research questions associated with annotations: 1) do
some contacts affect user choice more than others, and 2) are annotations relevant
across various information needs. We conduct a controlled experiment with 355
participants, using hypothetical searches and annotations, and elicit users’
choices. We find that domain contacts are preferred to close contacts, and this
preference persists across a variety of information needs. Further, these contacts
need not be experts and might be identified easily from conversation data.
