When? - Collaborative Web Search: Who, What, Where, When, and Why - page 53

evolution of the search task) as well as an icon indicating whether any comments have been attached
to the page; hovering over the comment icon reveals the full text of the comments.
In addition to facilitating asynchronous collaboration, persistently representing a search in
this fashion also facilitates informing a user about newly available, relevant content. For example, S 3
provides a standing queries feature, which, upon opening a saved search file, reissues its component
queries behind-the-scenes, and downloads and highlights newly-available, highly-ranked results
for each query. Increasing users' awareness of newly-available Web content has recently become
an active area of research, such as the development of change-aware Web browsers ( Teevan et al. ,
2009a ). Considering how this type of change awareness could translate to mechanisms for awareness
of what Web content one's collaborators have or have not viewed is an interesting area for future
work.

5.2 SYNCHRONOUS COLLABORATION

Although it is often convenient to work asynchronously, there are many situations when group
members simultaneously approach their shared search task. Scenarios where users are physi-
cally co-located generally result in synchronous collaboration, such as when Martha and George
at home, colleagues in a meeting, or students in a classroom work together to find infor-
mation in support of a shared project. Systems designed for co-located collaborative search,
therefore, also include features to support synchronous input, such as the input queuing
mechanisms of CoSearch ( Amershi and Morris , 2008 ) or the use of specialized multi-input-
aware surfaces in systems like WeSearch ( Morris et al. , 2010b ), Cambiera ( Isenberg and Fisher ,
2009 ), TeamSearch ( Morris et al. , 2006 ), Físchlár-DT ( Smeaton et al. , 2006 ), and WebSur-
face ( Tuddenham et al. , 2009 ).
Some synchronous collaboration systems are designed specifically for scenarios where
users are working together at the same time, yet they have differing roles in the search
process. For example, guided search tools support role-differentiated synchronous search-
ing, such as receiving the assistance of an online reference librarian via QuestionPoint
( http://www.oclc.org/questionpoint ) or of a more experienced searcher via ChaCha
( http://chacha.com ) .
For users with shared goals (i.e., one is not merely assisting the other out of professional
obligation), specialized synchronous tools have also been developed. For instance, the Smart Splitting
tool ( Morris et al. , 2008 ) (Figure 2.3) assists with division of labor among groups where members
have different areas of expertise, by partitioning a single set of search results among their respective
machines based on an adaptation of personalization algorithms. Cerchiamo ( Pickens et al. , 2008 )
(Figure 2.1) algorithmically merges input from two users, the “miner” and the “prospector,” in real
time in order to increase the relevance of video-search results.
Finally, some systems have been designed to support real-time collaboration amongst sets
of peers in disparate locations. Although its persistent state enables asynchronous work, SearchTo-
gether ( Morris and Horvitz , 2007b ) also supports a synchronous collaboration mode, and it provides