1 SearchTogether: An Interface for Collaborative Web Search Florian Eiteljörge June 11, 2013Florian Eiteljörge

Web Search: The Problem SearchTogether Design goals Features Evaluation & Results Discussion June 11, 2013Florian Eiteljörge Outline

Web Search: The Problem search engines designed for single-user scenario collaboration with other people produces double effort: people entering same keywords people visiting same websites extra communication necessary for exchanging search results June 11, 2013Florian Eiteljörge

SearchTogehter prototype application designed by Microsoft Research to simplify collaborative web search design goals: awareness: people are aware of what their search partners have already done division of labor: distribute the necessary effort to check search results for relevance persistence: save previous searches and several metadata to enable asynchronous collaboration and to ease continuation of previous search sessions June 11, 2013Florian Eiteljörge

June 11, 2013Florian Eiteljörge every executed search query is visible to all group members shared page history: you see in your search results which group member already visited a specific page rating: you can rate any page (thumbs up/thumbs down) and create comments which will be displayed to any other group member visiting the page and in shared page history Awareness-Features

Division of Labor-Features recommendation-queue: while visiting a page you recommend that page to a specific user to read it three types of search Standard Search: the search results will be displayed only to you Split Search: the top search results will be split up and every group member receives a portion of the result to check for relevance Multi-Engine Search: the search query will be send to n different search engines; each engines' results will be assigned to one group member to check for relevance instant messaging June 11, 2013Florian Eiteljörge

Persistence-Features every activity (including instant messages, recommendations, queries and search results) is logged and saved on a server to enable asynchronous search sessions search summary: every page which received a positive rating is shown with title, URL and comments June 11, 2013Florian Eiteljörge

June 11, 2013Florian Eiteljörge

Evaluation 14 subjects (all but one Microsoft employees) 20 minutes search sessions in pairs Results useful tool for searching: 3.9 on five-point Likert scale more effective than previously used methods: 4.1 on five-point Likert scale after the evaluation some of the pairs requested to get a copy of the search results instant messaging, recommendations and ratings heavily used Split- and Multi-Engine Search rarely used (bias most likely) June 11, 2013Florian Eiteljörge

Discussion June 11, 2013Florian Eiteljörge

Presentation based on Agrahri AK, Manickam DAT, Riedl J.: Can people collaborate to improve the relevance of search results? ACM Conference On Recommender Systems. 2008: June 11, 2013Florian Eiteljörge