Exploiting Extended Search Sessions for Recommending Search Experiences in the Social Web

HeyStaks is a case-based social search system that allows users to create and share case bases of search experiences (called staks) and uses these staks as the basis for result recommendations at search time. These recommendations are added to conventional results from Google and Bing so that searchers can benefit from more focused results from people they trust on topics that matter to them. An important point of friction in HeyStaks is the need for searchers to select their search context (that is, their active stak) at search time. In this paper we extend previous work that attempts to eliminate this friction by automatically recommending an active stak based on the searchers context (query terms, Google results, etc.) and demonstrate significant improvements in stak recommendation accuracy.