What? - Collaborative Web Search: Who, What, Where, When, and Why - page 22

Table 3.6: The percentage of 204 information workers completing a survey on Web search
habits who had engaged in several specific collaborative actions ( Morris et al. , 2008 ).
Collaborative Activity

Respondents

90.2%

Collaboration on Search Process

Watched over someone's shoulder as he/she searched the Web, and suggested
alternate query terms.

87.7%

Instant-messaged other people to coordinate real-time Web information-
seeking.

30.4%

Divided up responsibilities for a search task among several people, and then
shared the results.

18.1%

96.1%

Collaboration on Search Products

E-mailed someone links to share the results of a Web search. 86.3%

Showed a personal display to other people to share the results of a Web search. 85.3%

E-mailed someone a textual summary to share the results of a Web search. 60.3%

Called someone on the phone to tell them about the results of a Web search. 49.0%

Printed webpages on paper to share the results of a Web search. 41.2%

Created a document (other than a webpage or email) to share the results of
a Web search.

34.3%

Used a large form-factor or projected display to share the results of a Web
search.

24.5%

Created or posted to a webpage to share the results of a Web search. 15.2%

differ, there are many commonalities, including the realization that collaboration occurs both over
the process of search (preparing for and executing the search) and over the products of search (un-
derstanding and disseminating the results found). Researchers developing systems to better support
collaboration on search sometimes focus on designing systems to support integrating social inter-
actions throughout all stages of a search task (e.g., SearchTogether ( Morris and Horvitz , 2007b )),
and sometimes focus on supporting one of these more specific opportunities for collaboration (e.g.,
CoSense ( Paul and Morris , 2009 ), see Figure 3.2). Both are potentially valuable approaches to en-
hancing the experience of digital information seeking.
It is worth noting, however, that just as not all aspects of an individual's search happen in-
dividually, not all actions related to satisfying a collaborative information task take place collabora-
tively ( Bruce et al. , 2002 ). For example, as observed by Morris, M.R. ( 2008 ), collaborators sometimes
employ a divide and conquer strategy, breaking down the task into pieces each collaborator can fulfill
alone, without collaboration. Martha and George do this when they partition the task of finding