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

Asynchronous collaboration via persistent representations of search

Remote collaboration

Co-located collaboration

Collaborative sensemaking