Towards a model of understanding social search

Search engine researchers typically depict search as the soli-tary activity of an individual searcher. In contrast, results from our critical-incident survey of 150 users on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk service suggest that social interactions play an important role throughout the search process. Our main contribution is that we have integrated models from previ-ous work in sensemaking and information seeking behavior to present a canonical social model of user activities before, during, and after search, suggesting where in the search pro-cess both explicitly and implicitly shared information may be valuable to individual searchers. ACM Classification Keyword