Where? - Collaborative Web Search: Who, What, Where, When, and Why - page 29

4.1.1 EXAMPLE: SEARCHTOGETHER
SearchTogether enables remote collaboration among small groups of users, working either syn-
chronously or asynchronously on Web search tasks. A screenshot of the system is shown in Fig-
ure 4.4. SearchTogether was designed to support remote collaboration by including features to
support awareness , division of labor , and persistence .
Figure 4.4: SearchTogether ( Morris and Horvitz , 2007b ) supports remote collaboration (both syn-
chronous and asynchronous) among groups of users. The left column of the interface contains inte-
grated chat, a group query history, and the recommendations queue. The central column enables standard
or automatic-division-of-labor searching, and provides metadata-augmented views of search results. The
right column displays the current webpage, augmented with other group members' metadata, and provides
facilities for attaching comments and ratings to pages.
As discussed earlier regarding group hit highlighting, awareness of other group members'
activities can help make collaborative search a more lightweight interaction by reducing the need for
explicitly asking other group members for routine information, such as their recent queries. Such