When you’ve got a burning information need, to who do you turn? The one-size-fits-all search engine, or the niche community of a social network? More importantly, how do you adapt the language of your query based on your choice?

searching

In comparing the social media landscape to that of the less social web (static company, organization, and personal sites, in addition to purely informational pages), it becomes difficult to ignore the extent to which the language used within social networks differs from that of the non-social web. This applies to language used to query as well as to state opinions and facts. While the copy found on traditional static sites might tend toward overly positive marketing lingo in the case of business and organizational sites and even personal sites to some extent, conceptually, this language tends to be keyword-rich. This isn’t suprising, given that query language guidelines were drilled into many of us when we begin to use search systems heavily. From the time I learned to search, I was told what a stop word was, and quickly lost them from query approach.

Social networks and forums, on the other hand, are often frequently the site of less formal and (often) emotionally-charged conversations. Colloquialisms abound. These characteristics can mean that removing stop words from social media conversations before doing topic analysis can often obliterate coherent topics altogether. The only possible exception to this trend might be a company blog, which tends toward the same formality of a traditional site. But when real people get to talking within a blog network or forum, off the clock and about a topic they feel passionate about, all semblance of formality and thus careful choice of information-rich wording often flies out the window. This goes not just for comments, but for questions asked in social networks as well. These are often much more emotionally charged(frustration words, swear words,etc) and frequently poorly conveyed, like the user doesn’t know exactly what they’re asking, and they’re just sort of hoping someone will catch on.

Here are some examples of questions posed to social networks, chosen at random:

• HELP!!! My DS is driving me batty!!!
  The last week or so DS (almost 4) has become completely unbearable. I’m truly at a loss.
• music wont play, youtube video sound works but i think i am missing a plugin or something, i treid playin music with multiple programs and still nothing, i wish i could be more detailed but i did not get a error message to give you
• I was thinking…Is a highly advanced society in general unnatural? Societies based on money seems to be unnatural and “inhuman” for it is only there to create an economy and financial based live? Are some societies loosing “connection” with it’s basis? this is mighty brief but do you get the gist of what I am trying to explain?

These sorts of vague queries suggest that social networks are used earlier in the information-seeking process than search engines. People turn to their peers to help them figure out what they want in the first place, then they type in the language they’ve picked up in a search engine. Because of the more ambiguous, informal nature of conversations within social networks, they may learn information they weren’t seeking in the process, which can change what they ultimately want.

Here’s an interesting question – Will search engines ever be designed to perform a similar role in these early stages of information need? Right now, we can do site searches on blogs only using Google Advanced search, which may allow us to type in more natural language queries and actually get results. But what if your standard Google search was designed not to return results entirely based on precision and relevance to the query, but instead based on the value of the results in providing insight into the topic, customized for your specific point in the information-seeking process? More general searches on a topic would offer a selection of results designed to capture all the relevant sub-topics, ranked in order of their importance.

It would be difficult, to say the least. But worth waiting for!