Closing Information Gaps with Inverse Search

In this paper, we propose to improve the overall process of information retrieval by explicitly addressing information provision from private spaces of individual users into the public information space of an organization. Therefore, we present our approach of inverse search, which aims to stimulate the diffusion of documents from these private spaces. We introduce the notion of ail organizational information need (OIN) based on query logs and further usage statistics of our system. This information is used to recommend people to share private documents containing relevant information. Our main contributions are describing means to identify documents that should be shared and a framework to foster the diffusion of such documents. We also describe the implementation and results from initial evaluation studies(1).