In this paper, we explore various search tasks that are supported by a social bookmarking service. These bookmarking services hold great potential to powerfully combine personal tagging of information sources with interactive browsing, resulting in better social navigation. While there has been considerable interest in social tagging systems in recent years, little is known about their actual usage. In this paper, we present the results of a field study of a social bookmarking service that has been deployed in a large enterprise. We present new qualitative and quantitative data on how a corporate social tagging system was used, through both event logs (click level analysis) and interviews. We observed three types of search activities: community browsing, personal search, and explicit search. Community browsing was the most frequently used, and confirms the value of the social aspects of the system. We conclude that social bookmarking services support various kinds of exploratory search, and provide better personal bookmark management and enhance social navigation.
Access provided by Autonomous University of Puebla. Download to read the full chapter text
Chapter PDF
Similar content being viewed by others
Keywords
These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2007 Springer-Verlag London Limited
About this paper
Cite this paper
Millen, D.R., Yang, M., Whittaker, S., Feinberg, J. (2007). Social bookmarking and exploratory search. In: Bannon, L.J., Wagner, I., Gutwin, C., Harper, R.H.R., Schmidt, K. (eds) ECSCW 2007. Springer, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-84800-031-5_2
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-84800-031-5_2
Publisher Name: Springer, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-84800-030-8
Online ISBN: 978-1-84800-031-5
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)