How to Ask Effective Questions

We all ask questions of our social networks. For example, the other day I posted a question to Twitter looking for a hotel recommendation in Dublin for SIGIR 2013. When we ask questions, sometimes we get good answers, and sometimes we get bad answers. But the quality of the answers we get isn't completely random – it is something we, as question askers, can control. This post describes some of the tricks we have learned about how to ask effective questions online from our research.

Asking v. Searching

Most of the time when we want to know something, we don't turn to a search engine – we ask somebody a question. While we used to have to know the right person to ask, we can now use Facebook or Twitter to broadcast our questions to our entire social network. The kinds of questions that we ask our social networks are very similar to what we search for using search engines, except that we tend to keep our questions "cocktail party-appropriate." Not surprisingly, we are more likely to search about health, religion, sex, and politics than to ask questions on those topics. For example, although adult queries make up a sizable portion of search engine queries, my colleagues and I have yet to see a single question asking about porn in the course of our research.

Online Question Asking

 I do information retrieval research, which means that I try to figure out how people use search engines, and use what I learn from that to build better search algorithms. My goal is to take the short, one or two word query that you enter into a search box and use it to identify a few relevant results from among the billions of documents that make up the web. Something happened a few years ago, however, to change the way that I think about search.