This paper examines two important questions in the context of the social networking services (SNS) firms: what kind of competitive moves do SNS firms undertake and to what extent do the competitive moves impact firm performance?We blend the literature streams on information systems (IS) and strategic management and argue that given the unique characteristics of this nascent industry, SNS firms' competitive moves are likely to focus on value cocreation, as well as enhancement of the repertoire of their moves. We propose a conceptual model by blending value cocreation perspectives from the IS literature and repertoire of competitive actions from the competitive dynamics literature, and test our hypotheses using archival data. Results show that firms that emphasize value cocreation actions through the engagement of codevelopers in their technology platform and formation of strategic alliances enhance their performance. Furthermore, firms that undertake complex action repertoires achieve better performance. This study provides unique insights about the ways in which firms compete in the industry and has several implications for future research.
Web search engines have become an integral part of the daily life of a knowledge worker, who depends on these search engines to retrieve relevant information from the Web or from the company's vast document databases. Current search engines are very fast in terms of their response time to a user query. But their usefulness to the user in terms of retrieval performance leaves a lot to be desired. Typically, the user has to sift through a lot of nonrelevant documents to get only a few relevant ones for the user's information needs. Ranking functions play a very important role in the search engine retrieval performance. In this paper, we describe a methodology using genetic programming to discover new ranking functions for the Web-based information-seeking task. We exploit the content as well as structural information in the Web documents in the discovery process. The discovery process is carried out for both the ad hoc task and the routing task in retrieval. For either of the retrieval tasks, the retrieval performance of these newly discovered ranking functions has been found to be superior to the performance obtained by well-known ranking strategies in the information retrieval literature.