[2] Studying others' navigational trails and understanding their behavior can help improve one's own search strategy by guiding them to make more informed decisions based on the actions of others.
[5] This theory supports collaborative activities,[8] and is a guide for designers to build good interfaces where users can benefit from others' research.
[12] Bookmarking is a method to return to sites that appeal to one's interests,[12] as it creates a hyperlink that is saved for future browsing.
Recently, live updating of other current users adds another dimension to the social aspect of web browsing.
[21] Activity and traffic patterns can be used to evaluate the performance of existing systems, and improve site usability, architecture, and infrastructure.
Navigation is considered to have advantages over searching, since recognizing what users are looking for is easier than formulating and describing the information people need, which refers to the "vocabulary problem".
A tag cloud is a textual representation of the topic or subject collectively seen by the users and it captures the "aboutness" of the resource.
Markov chain models: Decentralized search: Different scholars provided the theoretic support to argue the suitability of folksonomies as a navigational aid.
There are four main perspectives: The evaluation method introduced in this section is based on the paper by Helic et al.[30] The author proposed in the paper the general idea that people can leverage on the output produced by folksonomy algorithms (hierarchical structures) as input (background knowledge) for decentralized search for the following reasons: Various applications of social navigation have been studied in educational system, such as Knowledge Sea II.
After a classroom study, Knowledge Sea II system shows better performance in visualization of content relevance of the textbook and satisfaction of student users.
The new version of virtPresenter shows better performance in social navigation function such as visualization, week-based filtering, and exchangeable bookmarks.
[35] To solve the “socially blind” problem based on the influx of mobile phone users, CityFlocks was designed to enable web annotations combined with coordinates upon physical targets in the city directly or indirectly.
The Juggler system combines MOO[clarification needed], a textual virtual environment, and a Web client.
More examples of history-rich information spaces has been implemented in different context such as educational domain,[38] location-based networking, and food recipes.
Other than simply showing the shortest time or distance like Google Maps, users’ specific experience and recommendation are underlined.
With both geo-position and message functions, SoNavNet allows users to send requests to their friends while presenting their current location and points of interest, from which they acquire route and venue information oriented to their needs.
[39] Martin Svensson and his team created a recipe recommendation system, European Food On-Line, which has both direct and indirect navigation approaches.
Social Navigator was implemented as a Java servlet to model users' behavior and net-based communication usages.
[40] Social navigation implementation plays a significant role in guiding users to find information they need.
[42] One of the common methods people used in the field of social navigation is to construct proxemics, which can be connected with human-robot interaction.
A study shows interests in different kinds of navigation behaviors humans expect from a robot in a path crossing scenario.
[43] Social navigation can be abused by malicious users who intend to mislead the public or obtain private information about specific person.
Researchers Meital Ben Sinai, Nimrod Partush, Shir Yadid, and Eran Yahav from Israel Technion performed some experiments in 2014 and wrote an article, “Exploiting Social Navigation”, to discuss the results.
The growth has led to more novel and diverse implementation of social navigation support, including in education, media, news, and tour guide systems.
Social navigation implementation in shared 3D environment works similarly, as it allows users to see trail and information of others who were in the same place before in the virtual world.