People frequently use social media to find information that may not be readily available from search engines or to request input from their peers. However, the search technology built into conventional social media platforms is not designed for information retrieval purposes. Since content is not archived, it is difficult to find answers to similar...

In social media, the term “viral” refers to when a piece of information (microblog, photograph, video, link, etc.) starts to spread in a social network and increases in popularity by an order-of-magnitude. Much work is currently being done to better understand the patterns and implications of this new phenomenon. Previous studies have devised...