Introduction - Collaborative Web Search: Who, What, Where, When, and Why - page 5

such situations appear to be commonplace. We explore whether people need or want to collaborate
on certain tasks when searching the Web. We also look at what strategies people currently employ
to collaborate using current search interfaces not explicitly designed to support collaborative search.
We further break down common search strategies to consider more specifically what aspects
of these tasks may benefit from collaboration. For example, collaboration can occur over the process
of searching or over the products of a search. When Martha suggests query terms to George as
they search together to learn more about common irritants, they are collaborating on the process of
search. And when Beth shares the list of links she finds with Martha, she is collaborating over the
product of her search. We examine specific search tactics that offer collaboration opportunities in
greater detail, considering work from the library sciences as well as the digital domain to identify
common patterns.
1.3.3 WHERE?
Another important dimension of collaborative search is where the participants are located relative
to the other collaborators. The members of the group may or may not be physically located in the
same location and may or may not be using the same machine. In our scenario, Martha and George
searched together on the same machine, while Martha and Beth collaborated remotely on separate
machines.
When collaborators are not physically located in the same place, we refer to their interaction
as remote collaboration . We investigate the affordances important for supporting remote collaborative
searches, such as support for awareness and division of labor among participants, and we examine
the SearchTogether system ( Morris and Horvitz , 2007b ) as an in-depth example.
Some systems designed to support collaborative search have focused on co-located collaboration ,
when all group members are physically co-present. We discuss the needs of co-located collaborators,
and explore how different device arrangements afford distinct design opportunities. For example,
CoSearch ( Amershi and Morris , 2008 ) facilitates co-located collaborative search by providing a
private input device (a mobile phone) for each group member, whereas WeSearch ( Morris et al. ,
2010b ) uses a single, shared multi-touch display.
1.3.4 WHEN?
Another interesting dimension of collaborative search is when the collaboration occurs. Collaborative
search activities can occur synchronously, with collaborators working simultaneously to find what
they are looking for, or asynchronously, with collaborators working individually in support of a shared
search goal.
Most current commercial search tools are better suited to asynchronous, rather than syn-
chronous, collaboration. Martha's sister Beth, for example, researched her sister's recently diagnosed
asthma on a Web search engine while Martha did other things, and emailed a list of interesting links
to Martha for further exploration at a different time. Systems designed to support asynchronous
collaboration typically do so by creating a persistent representation of Web investigations that fa-