An Examination on Emergence from Social Behavior: A Case in Information Retrieval

The swarm intelligence has been applied to enhancing web search. But few researches investigate the emergence from the behaviors of users when they forage information through web search engine. In this paper we study the emergence in users' click behaviors in AOL log and examine its reliability as the key to queries. We introduce kappa statistic to characterize the emergence through the consistency of users' clicks on the same query. By analyzing the kappa distribution, we reveal that emergence only occurs to the query issued by a large number of users; and for the queries issued by a fewer users, the clicks are not very reliable as an emergence. We further inter that the occurrence of emergence in users' click behaviors is somewhat related to the scale of users. It may be unreliable to apply techniques of swarm intelligence to enhancing web search for all the queries through considering all users as agents.