Paper Reading # 21

Comments
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Reference
Towards a Reputation-based Model of Social Web Search
Kevin McNally, Michael P. O'Mahony, Barry Smyth, Maurice Coyle, Peter Briggs
IUI'10, February 7-10, 2010, Hong Kong, China

Summary
This paper talks about how the web search is usually seen by users as a solitary space. The authors are proposing a web search collaboration system in which additional features are added to already mainstream web searching sites as Google or Yahoo. More specific the authors designed HeyStaks which has been deployed online and according to them, HeyStacks has more than 500 users. The idea of this design is to capture and share search experiences with other users. They believe this will facilitate web search by creating searching communities. Users that become community members can benefit from recommendations from other community members. Within these search communities, there are search leaders and search followers. They are identified by how much information they share, how many communities they create, and how much they share with other community members. The biggest benefits of using HeyStaks are that users can still use their favorite search engine, and is a more collaborative search experience. HeyStaks allows you to create what are called staks which are similar to a folder where you can save search experiences. These staks can be shared with other users to facilitate their search. These will generate recommendations to users based on relevance of users that have tagged or shared search experiences.  Staks can be private or public, and can limit which users use specific staks. Users can vote positively or negatively for search results.  HeyStaks has two types of ranking which are primary promotions and secondary promotions. These rankings can impact the relevance of the recommendations.

Discussion
Overall I believe the idea of HeyStaks is a great collaborative tool, although I probably would not ever use it except when maybe doing research. This last point brings me to a good point, it could potentially benefit researchers. The whole idea is to be able to help other users who search for similar topics. Some of the capabilities of HeyStaks seem to be similar to the already existing bookmarks in web browsers. The benefit of HeyStaks is that you can share your staks with other members, and they can also contribute to different search communities.