Information seeking with social signals: anatomy of a social tag-based exploratory search browser

Abstract

Whereas for the fact-retrieval searches, an optimal path to the document(s) containing the required information is crucial, learning and investigation activities lead to a more continuous and exploratory process with the knowledge acquired during this journey being essential as well. Therefore, information seeking systems should focus on providing cues that might make these explorations more efficient. One possible solution is in building information seeking systems in which navigation signposts are provided by social cues provided by a large number of other people. One possible source for social cues is social bookmarks in social tagging sites. Social tagging arose out of the need to organize found content that is worth revisiting. The collective behavior of users who tagged contents seems to offer a good basis for exploratory search interfaces, even for users who are not using social bookmarking sites. In this paper, we present the algorithm of a tag-based exploratory system based on this idea.