Do your friends make you smarter?: An analysis of social strategies in online information seeking

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Abstract

Prior research in the social search space has focused on the informational benefits of collaborating with others during web and workplace information seeking. However, social interactions, especially during complex tasks, can have cognitive benefits as well. Our goal in this paper is to document the methods and outcomes of using social resources to help with exploratory search tasks. We used a talk-aloud protocol and video capture to explore the actions of eight subjects as they completed two “Google-hard” search tasks. Task questions were alternated between a Social and Non-Social Condition. The Social Condition restricted participants to use only social resources—search engines were not allowed. The Non-Social Condition permitted normal web-based information sources, but restricted the use of social tools.

We describe the social tactics our participants used in their search process. Asking questions on social networking sites and targeting friends one-on-one both resulted in increased information processing but during different phases of the question–answering process. Participants received more responses via social networking sites but more thorough answers in private channels (one-on-one). We discuss the possibility that the technological and cultural affordances of different social–informational media may provide complementary cognitive benefits to searchers.

Our work suggests that online social tools could be better integrated with each other and with existing search facilities. We conclude with a discussion of our findings and implications for the design of social search tools.

Section snippets

Introduction and related work

As search engines and search algorithms have grown more sophisticated in recent years, people have become increasingly reliant on these technologies for seeking information. At the same time, the library science (Ehrlich and Cash, 1994, Fox et al., 1993, Shepherd, 1983, Taylor, 1968, Twidale et al., 1997), educational (Rogoff, 1990, Pea, 1993, Hatch and Gardner, 1997, Edelson et al., 1996, Karasavvidis, 2002), and organizational learning literatures (Granovetter, 1973, Allen, 1997, Burt, 1992,

Method

We used a talk-aloud protocol and video capture techniques to explore how eight users performed two search tasks related to US energy policy. Below we describe our study design and data analysis procedures.

Results

Our results focus on the process of social exploration and social reasoning that we observed. Since social search is still poorly supported by web technologies, we do not intend to do a full comparison of performance between the Social and NS Conditions. Instead, we focus on the outcomes of various social strategies in the Social Condition.

Discussion

In our study we observed several interesting patterns and noted that different types of social engagements (e.g., public versus private) may provide complementary cognitive benefits. While further study is needed to isolate the exact reasons why these benefits occur, we can discuss a few of the possibilities for our findings.

Conclusion

Our study provides some early insights to the behaviors and practices surrounding question–answering in social environments. Let us briefly summarize:

  • We identified three social tactics for information gathering (Targeted Asking, Network Asking, and Searching).

  • These tactics used in combination led to better search outcomes (based on Learning Scores).

  • Query composition on social networking sites resulted in reformulation and framing of the task problem.

  • Processing (targeted) friends’ answers led to

Acknowledgments

We extend a great thanks our willing participants and our collaborators in the Augmented Social Cognition group at PARC. We thank the reviewers of our manuscript for their critical comments. And we are grateful for the guidance from our energy policy experts: Gabriele Cente, Johannes Lehmann, and Lew Fulton. This work was supported in part by Office of Naval Research Contract No. N00014-08-C-0029 to Peter Pirolli.

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