text: Search engine researchers typically depict search as the solitary activity of an individual searcher. In contrast, results from our critical-incident survey of 150 users on Amazon's Mechanical Turk service suggest that social interactions play an important role throughout the search process. Our main contribution is that we have integrated models from previous work in sensemaking and information seeking behavior to present a canonical social model of user activities before, during, and after search, suggesting where in the search process even implicitly shared information may be valuable to individual searchers.
  @cite_9: Today's Web browsers provide limited support for rich information-seeking and information-sharing scenarios. A survey we conducted of 204 knowledge workers at a large technology company has revealed that a large proportion of users engage in searches that include collaborative activities. We present the results of the survey, and then review the implications of these findings for designing new Web search interfaces that provide tools for sharing.
summary: However, in addition to explicit collaboration in joint search tasks @cite_9 , we believe that even implicit social experiences could improve the search process. Therefore, the general term social search'' may more suitably describe information seeking and sensemaking habits that make use of a range of possible social interactions: including searches that utilize social and expertise networks or that may be done in shared social workspaces. This notion certainly encompasses collaborative co-located search, as well as remote and asynchronous collaborative and collective search. Our focus in this paper is to explore a model of social search that may offer suggestions for supporting social interactions in the information seeking process.