Giovanni Gardelli
Ingmar Weber
ABSTRACT
We use Yahoo!~Toolbar data to gain insights into why people use Q&A sites. For this purpose we look at tens of thousands of questions asked on both Yahoo!~Answers and on Wiki Answers. We analyze both the pre-question behavior of users as well as their general online behavior. Using an existing approach (Harper et al.), we classify questions into "informational" vs. "conversational". Finally, for a subset of users on Yahoo! Answers we also integrate age and gender into our analysis. Our results indicate that there is a one-dimensional spectrum of users ranging from "social users" to "informational users". In terms of demographics, we found that both younger and female users are more "social" on this scale, with older and male users being more "informational".
Concerning the pre-question behavior, users who first issue a question-related query, and especially those who do not click any web results, are more likely to issue informational questions than users who do not search before. Questions asked shortly after the registration of a new user on Yahoo! Answers tend to be social and have a lower probability of being preceded by a web search than other questions.
Finally, we observed evidence both for and against topical congruence between a user's questions and his web queries.
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Index Terms
- Why do you ask this?
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