Backstory

Contact: Gina Venolia (ginav@microsoft.com)

Backstory is an application that you can use to help you with search tasks, by providing two capabilities: (1) simultaneous search across multiple data sources, and (2) workflow support for multi-query investigations.

It's not unusual to submit the same query to multiple search engines. For example one might search for "hybrid car" on Windows Live Search, Wikipedia, and Amazon.com. Likewise one might search for "InitializeDocumentView" across the bug database, check-in history, source code, local files, and email. Backstory makes it easier to submit a query to multiple search engines by providing a checklist of search engines. Each search is represented by a column, the result sets are combined as rows, and checkmarks show which searches returned which results. At this time these search engines are supported

Some search activities require multiple queries to get to relevant information. In Backstory a group of related queries is called an investigation. Backstory provides several mechanisms for supporting investigations (refer to the screen shot below):

• Triage
  • Irrelevant search results can be discarded from the result set using the button.  Note that they are hidden from view but not deleted.  Even if a later search finds the same search result, if it it was discarded it remains discarded. (You can see the discarded items using the Filter drop-down.)
  • Search results can be marked as relevant to the investigation using the button.  (You can later use the Filter drop-down to see only the relevant items.)
  • The title of the item is shown in bold until you take some kind of action on it.  Think of this like the "unread" status on Outlook email messages.
  • If a query is promising, you may want to see more than just the first ten results that are shown by default.  Right-click on the query's column header and choose Get More Results.
• Adding your own two cents
  • Categorize items using tags.  To add a tag either choose New Tag... from the Actions menu or Set Tags... from the right-click menu.  A tag appears as a column of checkboxes.  You can click the column header to sort by it.  Tags can be used for workflow management ("to do", "to be read", etc.) or to create categories meaningful to your task.
  • Add a text note to any search result by right-clicking on it and choosing the Annotate... menu item.
  • Add notes not associated with any particular search result.  Choose Add Note... from the Actions menu.  The new note appears as a new row.
• Working with IE
  • View any item by clicking on its title or by double-clicking anywhere within it.
  • Backstory adds and buttons to the IE toolbar.  Use the thumbs-up icon to add the current page to the current investigation and mark it as relevant.  If the current page contains search results from Windows Live Search, a new query is added instead.  Use the thumbs-down icon to discard the current page from the current investigation.

• Pivoting
  • Some search result allow you to search for related items.  For example if you right-click on a search result that is a web page and then choose Search for Pages that Link to This One [Windows Live Search], a new query is created that adds those related pages to the investigation.
• Working over time
  • Save an investigation to a file using the Save item from the File menu.  You can open the file later, move it to another computer, share it with others, etc.
  • Because the world changes over time, the search results for a given query change over time.  You can re-execute the queries to see the latest results by invoking the Refresh All Queries command from the Actions menu.  New results are marked as unread and the checkmarks for the new results are marked with a little yellow star.  You can also re-execute queries individually by right-clicking on the column header and choosing Refresh.

Papers

Venolia, G., Morris, M. R., and Morris, D. Exploring and investigating: Supporting high-level search activities. MSR Tech Report MSR-TR-2007-05. January 2007.