TY - GEN
T1 - To search or to ask
T2 - 17th ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing, CSCW 2014
AU - Oeldorf-Hirsch, Anne
AU - Hecht, Brent
AU - Morris, Meredith Ringel
AU - Teevan, Jaime
AU - Gergle, Darren
PY - 2014
Y1 - 2014
N2 - In status message question asking (SMQA), members of social networking sites make use of status messages to express information needs to friends and contacts. We present findings from a laboratory study that examined 82 participants' SMQA behaviors in the broader context of online information seeking. When given the option of using a search engine and/or a social network, participants leveraged SMQA for 20% of their information needs, most often posing a question to their network in addition to issuing a query. We show the important roles played by the specificity of the information need and the perceived audience of a given network on routing decisions. We then demonstrate that routing decisions have varied effects on participants' satisfaction, information value, and trust of outcomes. In addition to highlighting the complementary advantages and disadvantages of search and SMQA, our findings suggest that search engines can better address a meaningful portion of people's information needs by integrating SMQA capabilities into their systems.
AB - In status message question asking (SMQA), members of social networking sites make use of status messages to express information needs to friends and contacts. We present findings from a laboratory study that examined 82 participants' SMQA behaviors in the broader context of online information seeking. When given the option of using a search engine and/or a social network, participants leveraged SMQA for 20% of their information needs, most often posing a question to their network in addition to issuing a query. We show the important roles played by the specificity of the information need and the perceived audience of a given network on routing decisions. We then demonstrate that routing decisions have varied effects on participants' satisfaction, information value, and trust of outcomes. In addition to highlighting the complementary advantages and disadvantages of search and SMQA, our findings suggest that search engines can better address a meaningful portion of people's information needs by integrating SMQA capabilities into their systems.
KW - Information seeking
KW - Social media question asking
KW - Social networks
KW - Social search
KW - Web search
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=84898966886&partnerID=8YFLogxK
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/citedby.url?scp=84898966886&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1145/2531602.2531706
DO - 10.1145/2531602.2531706
M3 - Conference contribution
AN - SCOPUS:84898966886
SN - 9781450325400
T3 - Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work, CSCW
SP - 16
EP - 27
BT - CSCW 2014 - Proceedings of the 17th ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing
PB - Association for Computing Machinery
Y2 - 15 February 2014 through 19 February 2014
ER -