Statistical analysis and implications of SNS search in under-developed countries

Abstract

Using Social Network Sites (SNS) as an information source has drawn the attention of the researchers for a while now. There has been many works that analyzed the types and topics of questions people ask in these networks and why. Topics like what motivate people to answer such queries, how to integrate the traditional search engines and SNS together are also well investigated. In this paper, we focus on a relevant but different issue - how SNS search varies in developed and developing regions of the world and why. Analyzing 470 status messages collected from a widely used SNS, we have observed that, unavailability and inadequacy of information on web in developing countries play a significant role to motivate users using SNS for information retrieval.With established statistics of Internet usage, e-Governance, and our experimental data analysis, we have tried to emphasize the differences between social search and traditional web-search and provided insight that one might require to consider while developing any application for SNS based searching.