SNS Search in Under-Developed Countries - Survey and Statistical Analysis Saif Ahmed 1 , Md. Tanvir Alam Anik 1 , Mashrura Tasnim 1 , Hasan Shahid Ferdous 2 1 Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology 2 Department of Computing and Information Systems, Unversity of Melbourne, Australia Email: saif.ahmed@csebuet.org, tanviranik@gmail.com, mashrura cse@yahoo.com, hasan.shahid@csebuet.org Abstract—The last decade has seen the emergence of the Social Networking Sites (SNS) and researchers are investigating the useful applications of this technology in various areas apart from its recreational value. Its ubiquitous presence has enabled people to obtain customized information seamlessly from their acquaintance. There have 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 the use of this technology in under-developed parts of the world and the new doors it has opened for its inhabitants. Based on a structured survey on 328 persons, we have tried to emphasize the differences between social search and traditional web-search. Our statistical analysis finds the correlations among different relevant parameters and provides insight that one might require to consider while developing any application for SNS based searching. Keywords - Social Networking Sites, Search, Survey, Informa- tion. I. I NTRODUCTION Individuals encounter a wide range of information needs in their everyday life. These include questions or queries, rec- ommendations about career development, factual knowledge regarding sophisticated technologies, rhetorical thoughts of life events, opinions about a major purchase, etc. Despite of the digital revolution over the past three decades that has enabled us to store and maintain large collection of data in a tiny amount of space and the evolution of search engines (SE) that has made it possible for us to look into tremendous amount of information within seconds, the recent developments in social networking sites have opened a new dimension in information searching. Recent trends have shown that many people tend to turn to their social networks for information rather than using the formal searching tools. Social network sites (SNS) are connecting individuals to one another with whom they have a previously established offline connections or different degrees of relational closeness in online or in real life. Thus it is likely that people turn to SNS as an efficient way to tap these connections for information-seeking purposes. In this study, we will use Facebook as an example SNS without losing any generality and seek to understand the extent to which Facebook users are likely to use the site for their information-seeking as well as information-retrieval activities. With one billion monthly active users and more than half a billion daily active users [1], currently (as of 14th April, 2013) it is the number two site in the world considering Internet traffic, according to Alexa ranking [2]. On an average, the users spend 10.5 billion minutes per day on it, make 421 million status message posts, 3.2 billion likes and comments, and have 140 friends in their network [3]. The average age of SNS users has also increased in recent years: among American Internet users, 70% of 30–49 year-olds, 51% of 50–64 year- olds, and 33% of those 65 or older now have a profile on a SNS. SNS provide users with source of information that is com- plementary to that provided by search engines. Search engines provide information that comes from ubiquitous source, i.e., web, in contrast to SNS that can provide objective data from a variety of sources on a variety of topics and is highly tailored to an individual. Information obtained from SNS is also found to be highly trusted, as we know the individual behind the information too. We can simply ask the members of our social network and get useful information that the researchers found quick, useful, and in many cases, more robust. For better understanding, we will emphasize on individuals’ question and answer exchange in their social networks. We will primarily focus on the developing regions of the world and see how SNS search has made significant changes in the way people access information here. We have conducted a survey of 328 people using Facebook. Our survey covered topics such as the types and topics of the questions asked, frequency of getting responses, reasonable response time of getting appropriate responses, frequency of questions asked, and motivations behind question asking on social networks. We discuss the related works in Section II. Section III presents the changes that SNS search is bringing in the under developed parts of the world to eradicate the digital divide. We present our survey data and analysis with its implication in Section IV before concluding. II. RELATED WORKS Lampe et. al. [4] analyzed how the use of Facebook has changed over time, using three consecutive years of survey data and thorough interviews with a few of the survey people. They reported that though the uses of the site remain relatively constant over time, but the perceived audience for user profiles and attitudes about the site showed differences over the study period. They find that patterns of use, perception, and attitude somewhat changed over the time. Their study, consistent with