Social media offers new opportunities for people to seek and share information. People are increasingly using social channels such as Facebook and Twitter, as well as community-driven services such as Reddit and Yahoo! Answers to look for information, opinions, and advice from others. Social Search, or broadly speaking Social Information Seeking, represents a class of behaviors, problems, and systems, concerned with people seeking information through such social and community-based sources. Social search allows one to leverage the "wisdom of the crowd" and benefit from customized information that may be more specific to their individual needs.

On the other hand, there is no guarantee that a question put forward through social search would be seen by a broad audience, or that the right person with the best information would respond. If the person who initiates a social search provides more detail, it may lead to higher quality responses. But the searcher also risks sharing too much information, which can put their privacy at risk. Over disclosure is a crucial issue for health-related information seeking. The information generated through social search can also come from unknown entities with unknown agendas, and validating and evaluating quality can be difficult.

Dr. Chirag Shah and his students in the InfoSeeking Lab at Rutgers University are investigating issues relating to social search by asking why and how people seek information through social media; how they assess information retrieved; what roles privacy and trust play in sharing information through social connections; and how we could design systems and services that leverage the wisdom of the crowd in an attempt to provide more personalized, customized, and trustworthy information.

For more information about Dr. Shah and his work on Social Search and Social Information Seeking, visit http://infoseeking.org/

Related publications:

Shah, C. (2015). Building a parsimonious model for identifying best answers using interaction history in community Q&A. Proceedings of the Association for Information Science and Technology (ASIST) Annual Meeting. St. Louis, MO. November 6-10, 2015.

Choi, D., Matni, Z., & Shah, C. (2015). Switching sources: a study of people's exploratory search behavior on social media and the Web. Proceedings of the Association for Information Science and Technology (ASIST) Annual Meeting. St. Louis, MO. November 6-10, 2015.

Shah, C., Kitzie, V., & Choi, E. (2014). Modalities, motivations, and materials - Investigating traditional and social online Q&A services. Journal of Information Science (JIS), 40(5), 669-687. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/01655515145...

Shah, C., Kitzie, V., & Choi, E. (2014). Questioning the question - Addressing the answerability of questions in community question-answering. Proceedings of Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS), Waikoloa, HI. January 6-9, 2014. http://www.computer.org/csdl/proceedi...

Shah, C., & Pomerantz, J. (2010). Evaluating and predicting answer quality in community QA. Proceedings of ACM SIGIR 2010 Conference. Geneva, Switzerland, pp. 411-418. July 19-23, 2010. http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=183...