When? - Collaborative Web Search: Who, What, Where, When, and Why - page 54

division of labor features to facilitate that process, such as the ability to divide the results of a single
query among multiple users or to federate a search to several specialty search engines and provide
different group members with different subsets of results. These division of labor features are de-
signed to take advantage of synchronous searching configurations by parallelizing the search task to
improve efficiency.
Awareness-promoting features were another important design consideration for supporting
synchronous work in SearchTogether. For instance, enabling real-time discussion through integrated
instant messaging supports communication during synchronous tasks and is inspired by survey
findings showing that with status quo Web browsing tools people use IM and phone conversations
to support synchronous, remote collaboration ( Morris, M.R. , 2008 ). SearchTogether's more recent
addition of “peek” and “follow” features ( http://research.microsoft.com/searchtogether )
(Figure 5.3) facilitate synchronous collaboration by providing co-browsing abilities, enabling for
real-time awareness of collaborators' current focus of attention.

Figure 5.3: The SearchTogether browser ( http://research.microsoft.com/searchtogether )
plug-in iterated on the original design ( Morris and Horvitz , 2007b ) in response to users' desire for more
awareness during synchronous collaboration, by adding the “peek” (A) and “follow” (B) buttons, that

enable users to engage in either brief (peek) or extended (follow) co-browsing.