Today, Web search is a solitary experience. Web browsers and search engine sites are typically designed to support a single user, working alone. However, collaboration on information-seeking tasks is actually quite commonplace! For example, students work together to complete homework assignments, friends seek information about entertainment opportunities, family members jointly plan vacation travel, and colleagues jointly conduct research for their projects. My research on collaborative search is aimed at facilitating small-group collaboration on search tasks; this webpage contains links to my papers and videos on collaborative search.
Gene Golovchinsky, Jeremy Pickens, and I will be guest editors for a special issue of the journal Information Processing & Management on the topic of Collaborative Information Seeking. The submission deadline has been extended to May 15, 2009. The CFP is now online. We also recently organized a Workshop on Collaborative Search for JCDL 2008 - the proceedings can be found on the workshop website.
Formative studies on collaborative search
- survey of users' collaborative search practices [ CHI 2008 paper ]
- motivations for supporting collaborative search [ CHI 2007 Exploratory Search & HCI Workshop paper ]
- diary study of co-located collaborative search practices [ CHI 2009 poster ]
Asynchronous collaboration via persistent representations of search
- S3: a system for storable, shareable search [ Interact 2007 paper ]
- SearchBar: a search-centric web history [ CHI 2008 paper ] [ CHI 2008 video (.mov) ] [ CHI 2007 Exploratory Search & HCI Workshop paper ]
Remote collaboration
- SearchTogether: a system for remote collaboration on web search [ UIST 2007 paper ] [ UIST 2007 video (.wmv) ] [ Free IE Plugin ]
- Enhancing collaborative Web search with personalization: Groupization, Smart Splitting, and Group Hit-Highlighting [ CSCW 2008 paper ] [ JCDL 2008 Collaborative IR Workshop paper ] [ WSDM 2009 paper ]
Co-located collaboration
- CoSearch: a system for co-located collaborative web search using a shared computer augmented by multiple mice or mobile phones [ CHI 2008 paper ] [ CHI 2008 video (.mov) ] [ CHI 2008 HCI for International & Community Development Workshop paper ]
- TeamSearch: a system for co-located collaborative search using a tabletop display [ Tabletop 2006 paper ]
Collaborative sensemaking
- CoSense: a tool to support collaborative sensemaking for collaborative search [ CHI 2009 paper ]
- thoughts on enhancing collaborative web search through shared sensemaking tools [ CHI 2008 Sensemaking Workshop paper ]