Where? - Collaborative Web Search: Who, What, Where, When, and Why - page 40

Figure 4.16: WebSurface ( Tuddenham et al. , 2009 ) supports co-located collaborative Web browsing
using a high-resolution projected tabletop, enabling side-by-side comparison and spatial grouping of
related pages.

4.2.1 EXAMPLE: COSEARCH

The CoSearch system ( Amershi and Morris , 2008 ) provides an example of how a system can support
co-located collaboration by providing separate input devices to each group member, in order to enable
distributed control. CoSearch was designed for the scenario where a group of users gathers around
a shared PC to search the Web, as often occurs in classrooms and libraries.
By interviewing several teachers and librarians, the designers of CoSearch identified several
limitations to conducting collaborative searches by sharing a single PC, described in Table 4.2.
Several of these difficulties arose for Martha and George when they searched together at home
for common household irritants. George initially ignored Martha's suggestion about what link he
should click, making it difficult for Martha to contribute. And when they found a page discussing
common household molds, the two encountered a pacing problem - George scrolled through the
page too fast for Martha to read.
To address these shortcomings of status quo search tools, Amershi and Morris designed
CoSearch (Figure 4.17), which supplements the shared PC with input from multiple mice and/or
mobile phones in order to distribute control of the search task among all group members. CoSearch's
two primary user interfaces are CoSearchPC, shown in Figure 4.18, which runs on the shared