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awareness can also reduce undesired redundancy of effort, such as when multiple group members
use the same keywords unintentionally. SearchTogether's Query Awareness region, shown in Fig-
ure 4.5, provides per-user query histories in order to help users maintain awareness of others' search
strategies. Page-specific metadata, shown in Figure 4.6, is also provided to support awareness among
remote collaborators. This works by augmenting search results pages and other webpages with icons
indicating which (if any) other group members have already visited a page, as well as any positive
or negative ratings and comments they may have given the page. This information can help users
decide, for example, to avoid visiting results that they can see other group members have already
tried and found to not be helpful.
Division of labor features help group members to avoid unnecessary redundant work and to
parallelize work among group members, perhaps suited to each user's specific skill set. For example,
more tech-savvy searchers may be skilled at formulating queries while their less technically proficient
collaborators can work on triaging results. SearchTogether facilitates flexible division of labor by
including integrated instant messaging features, to allow users to converse about strategies as they
search; such chats are stored along with the search session so that they are available for viewing
by asynchronous collaborators, as well. Another way to divide labor is through SearchTogether's
recommendation feature, which enables a user to push a particular webpage to another user; such
recommendations are queued up in a special area of the interface. Finally, SearchTogether supports
automatic division of labor through its “split search” and “multi-engine search” features. For each
of these features, one group member types a query, and the results are divided among the group.
For split search, the results are divided round-robin style among group members while for multi-
engine search each group member receives results from a different search source. For example,
if Martha and her sister used SearchTogether to research asthma treatments, Martha may have
chosen to divide the search results such that she received results from a general-purpose search
engine, while her sister received results from a health-focused vertical provider, such as PubMed
( http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed ) .
The persistence features in SearchTogether are designed to facilitate asynchronous collabo-
ration, a phenomenon which is discussed in greater detail in the next chapter. All content from a
SearchTogether session is persistently stored in a database so that it can be accessed by remote col-
laborators. Additionally, SearchTogether can automatically generate a search summary. An example
summary is shown in Figure 4.7. This artifact is meant to create an archival representation of the
search's key findings, which can be shared with a broader circle of collaborators. For example, the
default summary includes all pages that any group members gave a positive rating or comment to.
For each page in the summary, the title, thumbnail, and list of visiting group members is displayed,
as well as their comments and ratings. The summary provides links back to each of the original pages
mentioned.
Evaluations of SearchTogether found that awareness features were particularly important
to remote collaborators, as was the ability to export summaries of a group's sessions. Automatic
division of labor was less frequently used, although it remains to be seen whether smarter division
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