Towards a Model of Understanding Social Search

Search engine researchers typically depict search as the solitary activity of an individual searcher. In contrast, results from our critical-incident survey of 150 users on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk service suggest that so-cial interactions play an important role throughout the search process. Our main contribution is that we have integrated models from previous work in sensemaking and information seeking behavior to present a canon-ical social model of user activities before, during, and after search, suggesting where in the search process even implicitly shared information may be valuable to indi-vidual searchers. Author Keywords Social search, social navigation, information seeking