No abstract

As an attempt to better understand how people seek, share, and evaluate information in a social Q&A environment, this study identifies the selection criteria people employ when they select best answers in Yahoo! Answers in the context of relevance research. Using content analysis, we analyzed the comments people left upon the selection of best answers to their own questions. From 1,200 samples of comments, only 465 mentioned the specific reasons for their selection, thus becoming eligible for analysis. Through an iterative process of evaluating the types of comments, the best-answer selection criteria were inductively derived and grouped into seven value categories: Content value, Cognitive value, Socio-emotional value, Information source value, Extrinsic value, Utility, and General statement. While many of the identified criteria overlap with those found in previous relevance studies, the Socio-emotional value was particularly prominent in this study, especially when people ask for opinions and suggestions. These findings reflect the characteristics of a social Q&A site and extend our understanding of the relevance of an electronic environment where people bring their every day problem-solving and decision-making tasks. IntroductionContemporary views of users hold that they are not passive information receivers but active producers and distributors. New research paradigms pay close attention to users' voluntary participation and interaction in the on-line environment. Since Tim O'Reilly introduced the term web 2.0 in 2005, it has become a conceptual framework under which a variety of Internet applications and online activities are labeled as "participatory Web" (Madden & Fox, 2006). Among the various activities that characterize web 2.0, this study focuses on a social Q&A site.Distinguished from traditional Q&A systems or services in library settings, social Q&A sites provide a venue where people voluntarily ask of and answer questions from fellow users, without the intervention of experts or authorities in the field of interest. Through the process of asking and answering a wide range of questions from philosophical inquiries to miscellaneous problems in daily lives, people not only seek information but share their experiences, opinions, advice, and fun. Thanks to ordinary people who bring their own knowledge, experiences, and opinions into the site, information exchanged tends to be relative and unstable rather than objective and absolute. It is the questioner who has the responsibility to evaluate the answers posted by other people and filter the ones that best fit his/her information needs.In Yahoo! Answers, the social Q&A site examined in this study, a questioner is supposed to select the most appropriate answer and leave comments on that answer, which becomes the 'best-answer,' so that other users can continue to consult and evaluate the resolved question and the associated best-answer.To better understand how people seek, share, and evaluate information in such a social Q&A site, this study poses two res...

People are seeking more meaningful and customized information than what is obtained by keywords-based queries and document retrieval through a search engine. In this paper, we look at a set of such services, referred to as social Q&A sites. With sites such as Google Answers, and primarily Yahoo! Answers, we attempt to understand various characteristics of user participation and their possible effects on the design and success of the site. We discuss these social Q&A sites by comparing their designs based on user participation and point out the effects and defects of each. We show that active user participation is the core component of these sites. We further analyze rich data collected from more than 55,000 Yahoo! Answers user profiles to understand the nature of user participation, and the quality of this participation. With our analysis we discover that Yahoo! Answers model implicitly encourages users to make an active contribution. An important contribution of the work reported here is the framework with which various factors relating to user participation in social Q&A sites can be studied.

In this paper we present the results of a study that investigates the relationships between search tasks, information architecture, and interaction style. Three kinds of search tasks (simple lookup, complex lookup and exploratory) were performed using three different user interfaces (standard web site, hierarchical text-based faceted interface, and dynamic query faceted interface) for a large-scale public corpus containing semi-structured statistical data and reports. Twenty-eight people conducted the three kinds of searches in a between-subjects study and twelve others conducted the three kinds of searches on all three systems in a within-subjects study. Quantitative results demonstrate that the alternative general-purpose user interfaces that accept automated structuring of data offer comparable effectiveness, efficiency, and aesthetics to manually constructed architectures. Qualitative results demonstrate the manual architectures are favored.