Efficient cooperative searching on the Web: system design and evaluation

The World Wide Web provides a convenient and inexpensive infrastructure for Computer-Supported Cooperative Work. Groupware systems allow distant users to work together in a shared virtual workspace. Awareness of group members' actions is a basic feature and key functionality for groupware. Many times a group of people work together researching information on the Web about a topic. This type of collaboration can be decomposed into two tasks. First, team members have to access, process and filter by importance the Web pages gathered. Second, they have to synthesize and present them either as a whole in the form of a report, or in an organized way in the form of Web directories. A key issue that strongly affects this particular type of cooperative work is the revisiting of pages and, consequently, the time spent on accessing and processing the same information sources, which may be relevant or not to the topic. We propose group member URL traversal awareness (GMUTA) as significant functionality for Web-based collaboration tools in order to avoid conflicting or repetitive actions by group members. We then present a prototype system we developed, the Web Collaborative Searching Assistant (WCSA), which exploits GMUTA and helps distributed group members to work more efficiently. Experimental evaluation of the WCSA indicated that the functionality provided overcomes the above-mentioned problem, improves searching efficiency and adds substantial value to the collaboration.