Search patterns in a corporate social bookmarking service

This brilliant and useful paper found in Riina's blog explores the search patterns in dogear, a corporate social bookmarking service of a multinational company. This service, only available for company's employees, allows to bookmark internet and intranet links. Another particular feature of this system is the corportate identity of the employees that can not bet hidden by a pseudonym.

The research combines quantitative (log analysis of users actions, followed by cluster analysis of these data) and qualitative (15 interviews to users) methodology in order to explore search patterns within the dogear bookmarking. Three big groups are identificated: Community browsing, Personal search and Explicit search.

Millen, D., Yang, M., Whittaker, S., Feinberg, J., 2007. Social bookmarking and exploratory search
URL http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-1-84800-031-5\_2

The table (see above) shows the outcomes of the log analysis of users' actions where events represent the action of accessing a particular view (recent posts, another user bookmarks, oneself bookmarks...) and clicks the action of clicking in one result of these views.

Community search is the most common search pattern. Explicit search and personal search (oneself tags) come in second and third place. The more common pattern is to look at the recent post, but other strategies are also used, like looking at what "thought leaders" are bookmarking or what is hot in a particular topic. The interviews have highlighted that this strategies rely on the trust that employees have in the community or in some users. The fact that corporate identity (full name, contact details...) is displayed play an important role here, and also in another search pattern: looking for experts in the company.

Personal search states for users that come back to their own lists of bookmarks and tags. Users that make personal search are frequently those who are active bookmarkers.

While community search is typical of exploratory search (where the goal is not really to retrieve an element but to profile a user, a topic, news...), explicit search is more orientated to retrieve an element. This explains the high percentage of clicks (39%) in these views. Again, the trust in the community play an important role: "...relatively high proportion of clicks... combined with interviews comments suggest that social bookmarking services provide a good way to capture high value pointers to information sources".