There has been a lot of buzz around social search in the online tech community, but I am largely disappointed by the new tools and services I've encountered. It's not that these sites are unusable, but that they each seem to take on a different conception of what social search is and when/how it will be useful. Have these sites actually studied users doing social search tasks?
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R. Baeza-Yates, and A. Tiberi. KDD '07: Proceedings of the 13th ACM SIGKDD international conference on Knowledge discovery and data mining, page 76--85. New York, NY, USA, ACM, (2007)description = Extracting semantic relations from query logs,
location = San Jose, California, USA,
isbn = 978-1-59593-609-7,
doi = http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1281192.1281204.