Social search: Retrieving information in Online Social platforms - A suvey

Social Search research studies methodologies exploiting social information tobetter satisfy user information needs in Online Social Media while simplifyingthe search effort and consequently reducing the time spent and the computationalresources utilized. Starting from previous studies, in this work, weanalyze the current state of the art of the Social Search area, proposing a newtaxonomy and highlighting current limitations and open research directions.We divide the Social Search area into three subcategories, where the social aspectplays a pivotal role: Social Question&Answering, Social Content Search,and Social Collaborative Search. For each subcategory, we present the keyconcepts and selected representative approaches in the literature in greaterdetail. We found that, up to now, a large body of studies model users' preferencesand their relations by simply combining social features made availableby social platforms. It paves the way for significant research to exploit morestructured information about users' social profiles and behaviours (as theycan be inferred from data available on social platforms) to optimize theirinformation needs further.