A Review on Search and Discovery Mechanisms in Social Networks

Social search is a variant of information retrieval where a document or website is considered relevant if individuals from the searcher’s social network have interacted with it. To the best of our knowledge, there is no new detailed paper which covers discovery method in social network; therefore, in this paper we surveyed searching methods in social network which have been presented so far. We classified the existing methods in four main categories: people search, job search, keyword search and web service discovery. Also we conclude the paper with some implications for future research and practice. Index Terms — Social network, search, discovery, peerto-peer, distributed algorithm, scalability.