Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology
Web search strategies and human individual differences: A combined analysis: Research Articles
Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology
Knowledge sharing and yahoo answers: everyone knows something
Proceedings of the 17th international conference on World Wide Web
Exploring question subjectivity prediction in community QA
Proceedings of the 31st annual international ACM SIGIR conference on Research and development in information retrieval
Towards a model of understanding social search
Proceedings of the 2008 ACM conference on Computer supported cooperative work
Facts or friends?: distinguishing informational and conversational questions in social Q&A sites
Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
EMNLP '08 Proceedings of the Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Beyond DCG: user behavior as a predictor of a successful search
Proceedings of the third ACM international conference on Web search and data mining
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
Do your friends make you smarter?: An analysis of social strategies in online information seeking
Information Processing and Management: an International Journal
Who uses web search for what: and how
Proceedings of the fourth ACM international conference on Web search and data mining
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We use Yahoo!~Toolbar data to gain insights into why people use Q&A sites. For this purpose we look at tens of thousands of questions asked on both Yahoo!~Answers and on Wiki Answers. We analyze both the pre-question behavior of users as well as their general online behavior. Using an existing approach (Harper et al.), we classify questions into "informational" vs. "conversational". Finally, for a subset of users on Yahoo! Answers we also integrate age and gender into our analysis. Our results indicate that there is a one-dimensional spectrum of users ranging from "social users" to "informational users". In terms of demographics, we found that both younger and female users are more "social" on this scale, with older and male users being more "informational". Concerning the pre-question behavior, users who first issue a question-related query, and especially those who do not click any web results, are more likely to issue informational questions than users who do not search before. Questions asked shortly after the registration of a new user on Yahoo! Answers tend to be social and have a lower probability of being preceded by a web search than other questions. Finally, we observed evidence both for and against topical congruence between a user's questions and his web queries.