Facts or friends?: distinguishing informational and conversational questions in social Q&A sites
Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
What do people ask their social networks, and why?: a survey study of status message q&a behavior
Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
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We use Yahoo! Toolbar data to gain insights into why people use Q&A sites. We look at questions asked on Yahoo! Answers and analyze both the pre-question behavior of users as well as their general online behavior. Our results indicate that there is a one-dimensional spectrum of users ranging from "social users" to "informational users" and that web search and Q&A sites complement each other, rather than compete. Concerning the pre-question behavior, users who first issue a question-related query are more likely to issue informational questions, rather than conversational ones, and such questions are less likely to attract an answer. Finally, we only find weak evidence for topical congruence between a user's questions and his web queries.