EPISOSE: An Epistemology-Based Social Search Framework for Exploratory Information Seeking

Search engines are indispensable for locating information in WWW, but encounter great difficulties in handling exploratory information seeking, where precise keywords are hard to be formulated. A viable solution is to improve efficiency and quality of exploratory search by utilizing the wisdom of crowds (i.e., taking advantage of collective knowledge and efforts from a mass of searchers who share common or relevant search interests/goals). In this paper, we present an epistemology-based social search framework for supporting exploratory information seeking, which makes the best of both search engines’ immense power of information collection and pre-processing and human users’ knowledge of information filtering and post-processing. To validate the feasibility and effectiveness of the framework, we have designed and implemented a prototype system with the guidance of the framework. Our experimental results show that an epistemology-based social search system outperforms a conventional search engine for most exploratory information seeking tasks.