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Recent advancements in social technologies allow information seekers to reach out to a larger, more distributed group of people online when searching for information. In this study, people's question-asking behavior using a social Q&A service is conceptualized as social search behavior. We are particularly interested in investigating social search goals, strategies, tactics, informational outcomes, and social outcomes. We collected a total of 406 questions posted on Yahoo! Answers by 78 participants over one week. Interviews based on those questions and answers they received were conducted and content-analyzed. We identify five distinct search strategies and 15 tactics positioned on a continuum of two different dimensions in terms of answer quantity and answer quality. Pursuit of quantity or quality is influenced by five categories of goals identified in this study. The goals and associated strategies and tactics also influence people's perceived informational outcomes and social outcomes. Contributions of this study to the social search research community and implications for practitioners in the area of social Q&A services are discussed.

This study examines how bloggers establish and enhance the credibility of their blogs through a series of blogging practices. Based on an analysis of interviews with 22 independent bloggers who blog on a range of topics, we present audience-aware credibility as a theoretical construct. Audience-aware credibility is defined as how bloggers signal their credibility based on who they think their audience is and how they provide value to that perceived audience. The analysis of bloggers’ credibility constructs, conceptualizations of audience, and perceived blog value identified four types of bloggers who constructed audience-aware credibility in distinctive ways: Community Builder, Expertise Provider, Topic Synthesizer, and Information Filterer. We then report on these bloggers’ blogging practices for establishing credibility and strategies for interacting with their audience to enhance credibility. The contributions of this study are to expand credibility constructs for social media research and to demonstrate the role of credibility perceptions in content contributors’ online activities. The findings reveal that a multi-dimensional construct of audience-aware credibility serves as a driving factor influencing and shaping blogging practices of all four types of bloggers. Copyright © 2014, Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (www.aaai.org). All rights reserved.

This panel addresses information credibility issues in the context of social media. During this panel, participants will discuss people's credibility perceptions of online content in social media f ...

With the evolution of the Web and development of web-based search engines, online searching has become a common method for obtaining information. Given this popularity, the question arises as to how much time people save by using search engines for their information needs compared to offline sources, as well as how online searching affects both search experiences and search outcomes. Using a random sample of queries from a major search engine and a sample of reference questions from the Internet Public Library (IPL), we conduct a real-effort experiment to compare online and offline search experiences and outcomes. We find that participants are significantly more likely to find an answer on the Web (100 %), compared to offline searching (between 87 % and 90 %). Restricting our analysis to the set of questions in which participants find answers in both treatments, a Web search takes on average 7 (9) minutes, whereas the corresponding offline search takes 22 (19) minutes for a search-engine (IPL) question. Furthermore, while raters judge library sources to be significantly more trustworthy and authoritative than the corresponding Web sources, they judge Web sources as significantly more relevant. Balancing all factors, we find that the overall source quality is not significantly different between the two treatments for the set of search-engine questions. However, for IPL questions, we find that non-Web sources are judged to have significantly higher overall quality than the corresponding Web sources. In comparison, for factual questions, Web search results are significantly more likely to be correct (66 % vs. 43 %). Lastly, post-search questionnaires reveal that participants find online searching more enjoyable than offline searching.

In this paper, we examine the value of social question-answering (Q&A) services as a platform for social search. We present a quasi-field study where we instructed 20 study participants to use a social Q&A service, Yahoo! Answers, for a period of one week, and interviewed them about their experience with Yahoo! Answers based on the questions (N=99) they posted to the site. The results indicate that participants turned to a social search system when they needed firsthand information, diverse perspectives, and others' value judgments. Participants also preferred social search systems over web search engines in situations where they could obtain tailored information, access original and non-popular information, filter out information, and interact with real people. Various strategies that participants employed to ensure that their questions would be likely to be answered were also identified. This study contributes to the field of information science by investigating a social Q&A service using the framework of social search from the information seeker's perspective. The results have implications for developers and designers of social search systems.

Social network site (SNS) platforms have the potential to be effective information-seeking channels due to their technical and social affordances, such as the ability to broadcast content to a large group and to aggregate one's contacts. This study tests the impact of a Facebook app that allows users to visualize their network of Facebook Friends to see how it influences who adolescents identify as good sources of information about college. Comparing Friends selected by 24 high school seniors before and after viewing Facebook network visualizations reveals that first-generation students were more likely to select higher quality information sources among their Facebook Friends after exposure to the visualization. Our results suggest that social media can help users identify good human information sources by making hidden resources in one's network more visible.

Individuals may encounter distinct kinds of challenges in assessing credibility in a social Q&A setting where they interact with strangers. It is necessary to better understand how people make credibility judgments when seeking information using social Q&A services because people increasingly use such services to obtain personalized answers from a large pool of unknown people. In this paper, we report preliminary findings from a quasi-field study where participants were asked to use Yahoo! Answers for one week and were interviewed afterwards. We find that participants’ assessment of the credibility of strangers who answered their questions occurred in three different dimensions: attitude, trustworthiness, and expertise. Furthermore, different elements were noticed and interpreted in each dimension of the credibility assessment. Our work provides insights into source credibility assessment in social Q&A settings and implications for the design of social technologies that better support people’s online credibility assessment.

Online question-answering services provide mechanisms for knowledge exchange by allowing users to ask and answer questions on a wide range of topics. A key question for designing such services is whether charging a price has an effect on answer quality. Two field experiments using one such service, Google Answers, offer conflicting answers to this question. To resolve this inconsistency, we re-analyze data from Harper et al. [5] and Chen et al. [2] to study the price effect in greater depth. Decomposing the price effect into two different levels yields results that reconcile those of the two field experiments. Specifically, we find that: (1) a higher price significantly increases the likelihood that a question receives an answer and (2) for questions that receive an answer, there is no significant price effect on answer quality. Additionally, we find that the rater background makes a difference in evaluating answer quality.

Reactive-magnetron-sputtered ZrO2 thin film has been deposited on Si directly for gate dielectric application. Both structural and electrical properties of the ZrO2 film have been investigated. An amorphous structure for 30Å ZrO2 and a semi-amorphous structure for 200Å ZrO2 have been revealed. The sputtered film shows a good stoichiometry and a good structural stability of ZrO2 based on the X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy and Rutherford backscattering spectroscopy data. Thin equivalent oxide thickness of about 11.5Å was obtained without the consideration of quantum mechanical effects. A low leakage of less than 10−2 A/cm2 at ±1V relative to the flat band voltage was obtained for this 11.5Å equivalent oxide thickness Pt/ZrO2/Si structure. High effective dielectric breakdown and superior reliability properties have been demonstrated for ZrO2 gate dielectric.