Where? - Collaborative Web Search: Who, What, Where, When, and Why - page 43

Figure 4.19: CoSearch users' mobile phones connect to the shared PC over Bluetooth, and can be used
to type query terms and send them to the PC, to control a mouse cursor on the PC, to view individual
webpages, and to download session notes.
Evaluations of CoSearch found that it addressed the aforementioned limitations of shared-
computer searching, while preserving high communication and awareness levels among groups as
compared with providing each group member with their own, side-by-side, PC.
Since, as mentioned earlier, computer-sharing for searches often occurs in resource-
constrained environments, it is possible that users may not have Web-enabled mobile phones with
which to operate a system like CoSearch. For this reason, CoSearch also offers a subset of its func-
tionality by connecting multiple mice to a single computer. This enables multi-cursor operations,
such as enqueuing links in the page queue, but eliminates features that require text entry, such as
simultaneous query entry capabilities. Understanding how to better support simultaneous search
with impoverished input devices is an important area of future work for many resource-constrained
settings, such as schools or internet kiosks in the developing world. Work on text-entry techniques
for multi-mouse setups ( Amershi et al. , 2010 ) is one example of an advance that could be used to
enrich future multi-mouse collaborative search tools.