Understanding the potential of social questions in the web search

In this paper, we analyzed the potential of the query-associated social questions for the Web search. The query-associated social question is the question related with a query term asked by users in the social network. We show how people respond to the query-associated social questions and how they can be utilized during the Web search. To this end, we built a toy-browser which displays both search results and related social questions at the same time and conducted a user study. Our findings show that people wish to know the answer of the social questions and want to exploit interesting topics conveyed by social questions. Copyright �� 2012 by the Association for Computing Machinery, Inc. (ACM)