Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
CHAPTER
6
Why?
This chapter looks at why people work with the group members they do during collaborative search
activities. We begin by looking at how people are brought together because of a shared interest in
a common topic, and then we discuss many of the social reasons people might collaborate. We also
examine how social search systems that implicitly use groups' data could identify opportunities for
transitioning to more explicit collaborations. We conclude with a discussion of how these motivations
for collaborating might be supported and enhanced in future collaborative search tools.
6.1
SHARED INTEREST IN A TOPIC
One reason people work together to find information is that they have a shared interest in the topic
of the search. For example, because both George and Martha are interested in Martha's health,
learning more about asthma and common irritants following her diagnosis was valuable to both of
them. There are a number of reasons why turning to other people who share an interest in a topic
might benefit the individual, which we examine in this section. We also discuss how existing systems
bring together people with common interests, and we suggest ways collaborative search systems
might make such topical connections more effectively in the future.
Via a survey of 624 people, Morris et al. ( 2010c ) explored the reasons that people reported
for asking and answering questions of people in their online social networks. They found that many
of the reasons people reported for answering a question asked by a friend related to the topic of
the question being asked. These properties included whether the answerer considered the question's
topic interesting, whether the answerer possessed expertise in the question's topic area, and whether
the question was scoped to an audience the answerer considered himself part of.
Teevan et al. ( 2009b ) studied the similarity of people with similar interests or long-standing
relationships, to understand whether such people engaged in similar tasks, thought the same things
were relevant to shared tasks, or had similar user profiles overall. They found that their participants
did not have similar profiles or relevance judgments for general search tasks, but that when the tasks
related to the topics at the core of users' relationships, they did. For example, coworkers did not
find the same things relevant to queries related to photography or restaurants, but did find the same
things relevant for topics related to their job.
There are a number of reasons why, when a person shares a topical information need with
other people, that person may find it more valuable to satisfy the need with others instead of alone.
Table 6.1 lists the most common motivations Morris et al. ( 2010c ) observed for a person to ask their
social network a question rather than (or in addition to) conducting a Web search on the topic. They
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