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?
M. Schubert, A. Felfernig, and F. Reinfrank. Proceedings of the 9th International Conference of Flexible Query Answering Systems, page to appear. (2011)
A. Felfernig, M. Schubert, and C. Zehentner. Artificial Intelligence for Engineering Design, Analysis, and Manufacturing (AIEDAM), 25 (2):
175-184(2011)
M. Schubert, A. Felfernig, and M. Mandl. Trends in Applied Intelligent Systems - 23rd International Conference on Industrial Engineering and Other Applications of Applied Intelligent Systems, page 621-630. Springer, (2010)
A. Felfernig, M. Mandl, and M. Schubert. Informatik 2010: Service Science - Neue Perspektiven für die Informatik, Beiträge der 40. Jahrestagung der Gesellschaft für Informatik e.V. (GI), Band 1, 27.09. - 1.10.2010, Leipzig, page 767-772. GI, (2010)