SOCIAL SEARCH STRATEGIES

EXPLORING THE COGNITIVE
CONSEQUENCES OF SOCIAL SEARCH
UC San Diego Brynn M. Evans

PARC Sanjay Kairam
PARC Peter Pirolli

CHI ’09 April 9, 2009
Tuesday, April 14, 2009

Research Goal


As a study of social search, we are particularly interested in HOW people make use of social
resources during search tasks.

Motivation


This is important because Google sometimes fails us.

In fact, exploratory queries are dificult to answer with traditional search alone (there were
several sessions at CHI that have looked at this issue).

Motivation

Photo Credit: David Wild

MORRIS 2008; EVANS CHI 2008


Yet prior work has shown that people do ask friends for help during search.

Social interactions are actually quite common during search (between half and two-thirds of
searches may involve social interactions).

Motivation

HATCH GARDNER 1993; KARASAVVIDIS 2002


Additionally, social interactions play an important cognitive role in problem solving,
brainstorming, and learning tasks. People help each other think through problems and
reframe issues.

This has been documented in classrooms, organizations, libraries, and other physical
environments.

Study design

•
•
‣

•
•
•


To study the beneﬁt of social interactions in search, we recruited 8 subjects who were expert
searchers, highly social.

They performed 2 Google-hard search tasks in two seach conditions. We video recorded all
interactions and asked them to talk-aloud while they were searching.

Study design: tasks

55 MPH PYROLYTIC OIL

“If we lowered the speed “What role does pyrolytic oil
limit nationally to 55 mph, (or pyrolysis) play in the
how many fewer barrels of debate over carbon
oil would the U.S. consume emissions?”
every year?”


These were our task questions.

Study design: conditions

NON-SOCIAL CONDITION


Subjects received each task in one of two conditions.

In the non-social condition, they performed an otherwise typical web search...

Study design: conditions

SOCIAL CONDITION


In the Social Condition, they were restricted to social resources only: friends, social networks,
blogs, question-answer sites...

Three primar y social strategies

TARGETED ASKING

NETWORK ASKING

SEARCHING

Photo Credit: Timothy Morgan

Our analysis is restricted to the social condition right now, since we are primarily interested
in HOW people exploit their social enviroments.

We found that people used one of three primary social tactics to answer our task problems

Task performance

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You can *quot;see these strategies reﬂected in the color coding of behaviors on one subject’s
timeline.+quot;
This person begins by searching over MetaFilter; then posts questions on MetaFilter
Twitter; #!quot;
and ﬁnally IMs with a friend to get additional help.
But as you can also see, these activities are interspersed with many other behaviors (as
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expected) -- such as the gray bars: thinking/synthesizing the information he’s come across
#$quot;

Task performance

SEARCHING
SEARCHING

[ ]
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Task performance

NETWORK ASKING
NETWORK ASKING

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timeline.+quot;
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Task performance

TARGETED ASKING
TARGETED ASKING

[ ]
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Task performance

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OTHER THINKING
RESPONSES?
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timeline.+quot;
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Of course, subjects were highly diverse in the strategies they employed, as can be seen by
the various color coding patterns in their search episodes. This shows patterns for all 8
subjects (in the social condition).
Some didn’t have an expert friend on hand -- (they didn’t have the “lifeline” to call.) Or they
didn’t usually post questions to their friends on Facebook, for example. For this reason, not
everyone performed all three social strategies.

Task performance

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each line == one fact

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Next, we mapped the facts subjects found to the type of behavior they were engaged in.

...the size of the bubble represents the depth of processing of that one fact. And you can see
that some facts do become synthesized more over time. [see fact #2, #3, #4, #5, #6]

Results

#social #facts
ID
tactics discovered
combining social tactics
correlates better to performance S01 3 6

on our tasks than: S02 1 2
S03 3 8
social network size
• S04 1 1

• network diversity S05 2 5
(as measured by the position generator) S06 2 1
background knowledge / intrinsic
• S07 1 1
interest in topic S08 3 3

Spearman R: 0.77


We found that any one social tactic used on its own didn’t produce as good performance
outcomes as combining social tactics together.

This is reﬂected in both the total number of facts discovered in the session and how deeply
users actually processed information (which isn’t elaborated on here).

This suggests that accessing people with dierent technologies makes a dierence in their
beneﬁt to you.

Results

“Now, what could I say?”
deeper cognitive processing
of information while: “Let’s see...what do I
really want to be asking?”

Composing the question Receiving Information

More thinking, contemplation
Network No pondering or mulling over of
while crafting query (3/5 users)
(Asking) network responses (0/4 users)

Little thinking or reformulation
Targeted More synthesis of information
of problem statement
(Asking) from friends’ replies (4/5 users)
(2/7 users)


And looking at the cognitive processing of information, this is absolutely what we saw.

However the story is more nuanced than that:

If we divided the search phase into the question and answering components:
We found that users had more thinking and contemplation of their search problem while they
were composing the question (e.g., when posting it to a social network...)

Results

deeper cognitive processing
of information while:

Composing the question Receiving Information

No pondering or mulling over of
Network More thinking, contemplation
network responses (0/4 users)
(Asking) while crafting query (3/5 users)

Little thinking or reformulation
Targeted More synthesis of information
of problem statement
(Asking) from friends’ replies (4/5 users)
(2/7 users)


In contrast, users more deeply integrated and synthesized information from replies shared
from friends who they interacted with one-on-one.

This could be due to a number of dierent things. For one, replies on social networks tended
to be goofy, silly, or o-target. They didn’t contain any facts that helped subjects advance
their understanding of the search question. (In fact, when we followed up with these
respondents, they reported wanting to start a conversation with our users rather than help
with a substantive reply).

Results

deeper cognitive processing More synthesis of
of information while: information from friends’
replies (4/5 users)

SS03
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We can see that users paused to think about shared information from targeted asking in one
quot;
subject’s timeline: The green (asking friends) and gray bands (thinking episodes) pattern each
other. This is only illustrated for one subject, but was true for most of the subjects who
'quot;

engaged (quot; targeted asking.
in

)quot;

*quot;

Conclusions implications


So we have seen how dierent types of social engagement beneﬁt the search
process.

People serve as more than information resources; they also provide cognitive
beneﬁts!

In particular we saw problem reformulation while posting questions on social

Acknowledgements

A GREAT THANKS TO:


SOCIAL SEARCH STRATEGIES

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