Abstract
Web users are increasingly relying on social interaction to complete and validate the results of their search activities. While search systems are superior machines to get world-wide information, the opinions collected within friends and expert/local communities can ultimately determine our decisions: human curiosity and creativity is often capable of going much beyond the capabilities of search systems in scouting "interesting" results, or suggesting new, unexpected search directions. Such personalized interaction occurs in most times aside of the search systems and processes, possibly instrumented and mediated by a social network; when such interaction is completed and users resort to the use of search systems, they do it through new queries, loosely related to the previous search or to the social interaction. In this paper we propose CrowdSearcher, a novel search paradigm that embodies crowds as first-class sources for the information seeking process. CrowdSearcher aims at filling the gap between generalized search systems, which operate upon world-wide information - including facts and recommendations as crawled and indexed by computerized systems - with social systems, capable of interacting with real people, in real time, to capture their opinions, suggestions, emotions. The technical contribution of this paper is the discussion of a model and architecture for integrating computerized search with human interaction, by showing how search systems can drive and encapsulate social systems. In particular we show how social platforms, such as Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter, can be used for crowdsourcing search-related tasks; we demonstrate our approach with several prototypes and we report on our experiment upon real user communities.
Original language | English |
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Title of host publication | WWW'12 - Proceedings of the 21st Annual Conference on World Wide Web |
Pages | 1009-1018 |
Number of pages | 10 |
DOIs | |
Publication status | Published - 2012 |
Externally published | Yes |
Event | 21st Annual Conference on World Wide Web, WWW'12 - Lyon, France Duration: 16 Apr 2012 → 20 Apr 2012 |
Conference
Conference | 21st Annual Conference on World Wide Web, WWW'12 |
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Country/Territory | France |
City | Lyon |
Period | 16/04/12 → 20/04/12 |
Keywords
- Crowd sourcing
- Exploratory search
- Information seeking
- Multi-domain search
- Search engine
- Search service
- Social network