A Comparative Study of Collaborative and IndividualWeb Search for a Social Planning Task

In this paper we describe the results of a study which compares explicit synchronous collaborative web search with searching the web individually when users are utilizing the web for the purpose of social planning tasks, in specific travel planning. We explore both co-located and distributed collaborative search within groups of two and three participants. The distributed collaborative search is supported by SearchTogether. The results show that distributed collaborative search in general outperforms both co-located and individual search. Surprisingly, the increase of the group size negatively influences the search results, though it positively affects the user confidence in the search results. We conclude that the negative effect arises due to an increased communication effort and suggest future work in HCI to better support collaboration in large groups.

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