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 special issue has a lot of interesting papers, and will be coming out in late 2009 or early 2010. We also recently organized a Workshop on Collaborative Search for JCDL 2008 - the proceedings can be found on the workshop website. We are hosting an upcoming workshop on February 7th, 2010, at CSCW 2010. Position papers are due on November 20th. Check out our CSCW 2010 Collaborative Information Seeking Workshop Website for more details.
Coming soon -- Jaime Teevan and I are co-authoring a book for Morgan & Claypool's Series on Information Concepts, Retrieval, and Services, called Collaborative Search: Who, What, Where, When, and Why. The publisher's site will have more information once the book becomes available.
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
- An overview of the use of Surface Computing devices for search tasks [IP&M paper (coming soon)]
- WeSearch: Collaborative web search for tabletop displays. [ CSCW 2010 paper & video (coming soon) ]
- 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 ]