Collaborative and Social Search

Meredith Ringel Morris

Microsoft Research

Today, Web search is a solitary experience. Web browsers and search engine sites are typically designed to support a single user, working alone. However, collaboration on information-seeking tasks is actually quite commonplace! For example, students work together to complete homework assignments, friends seek information about entertainment opportunities, family members jointly plan vacation travel, and colleagues jointly conduct research for their projects. My research on collaborative search is aimed at facilitating small-group collaboration on search tasks; this webpage contains links to my papers and videos on collaborative search. Collaborative search is one example of social search, wherein users employ social resources to further an information need. More recently, I have begun to explore other aspects of social search, particularly the ways in which question-asking on social networks can complement the use of search engines.

Gene Golovchinsky, Jeremy Pickens, and I were guest editors for a special issue of the journal Information Processing & Management on the topic of Collaborative Information Seeking (Volume 46, Issue 6, Nov. 2010). We also recently organized a series of 3 workshops on the topic: a workshop at JCDL 2008, a workshop at CSCW 2010, and a workshop at CIKM 2011.

Jaime Teevan and I wrote a book for Morgan & Claypool's Series on Information Concepts, Retrieval, and Services, called Collaborative Search: Who, What, Where, When, and Why.

I organized the Social Search Social at Microsoft Research in February 2012. This event provided an opportunity for attendees of WSDM 2012 and CSCW 2012 to meet each other and learn about ongoing work in the area of social and collaborative search. As part of that event, I set up a community e-mail list for the purposes of announcing CFPs or workshops related to social search, or for seeking collaborators or participants in social search research efforts. This is a low traffic list that is moderated to prevent spam. To join, send a blank email to join-socialsearchannouncements@list.research.microsoft.com (be sure to send a blank message, without signatures, etc - non-blank messages are rejected by the server as spam). To post, send a message to socialsearchannouncements@list.research.microsoft.com (note that only list members can post messages).

Formative studies on collaborative search

Asynchronous collaboration via persistent representations of search

Remote collaboration

Co-located collaboration

Collaborative sensemaking

Social search and social network question-asking

  • A survey study of how people use social networks like Facebook and Twitter to ask and answer questions. [ CHI 2010 paper ]
  • A comparison of information seeking using search engines and social networks. [ ICWSM 2010 paper ]
  • Understanding how question phrasing on Facebook impacts response metrics. [ ICWSM 2011 paper ]
  • Cross-cultural differences in social network Q&A [ ICWSM 2011 paper ]
  • Comparing Twitter search and Web search [ WSDM 2011 paper ]
  • Understanding Twitter credibility perceptions [ CSCW 2012 paper ]
  • Socially Embedded Search Engines [ ICWSM 2012 paper ]

Search education