Social Search in the Context of Social Navigation

The explosive growth of Web-based educational resources requires a new approach for accessing relevant information effectively. Social searching in the context of social navigation is one of several answers to this problem, in the domain of information retrieval. It provides users with not merely a traditional ranked list, but also with visual hints which can guide users to information provided by their colleagues. A personalized and context-dependent social searching system has been implemented on a platform called KnowledgeSea , an open-corpus Web-based educational support system with multiple access methods. Validity tests were run on a variety of aspects and results have shown that this is an effective way to help users access relevant, essential information.