Team search will do without gestures

Microsoft has developed an application for team web search.

Despite the fact that all kinds of web-based applications continue to flourish with terry color, many of the most popular Internet tools are used without outside participation. “Such tools are designed to enable people to use them without outside help, but this is not always a good solution,” says Miridith Maurice, a researcher from the group of Adaptive Systems and Interaction at Microsoft Research . It is often possible to observe how people who are together looking for something on the Internet — whether they are spouses who are planning a joint journey, or students who perform a group task — do the same work that their comrades have already done or not may discover a site that has been discovered by others. Maurice is developing an application that should help more effectively conduct a team search on the network.

SearchTogether helps you search for a group of people, regardless of whether they are online at the same time or connected at different times. This program is a plug-in for Internet Explorer 7 and requires registration in Windows Live. According to Maurice, as soon as all participants install this application for themselves, any of them can invite others to take part in a group Web search. The tool tracks the progress of the entire group, allowing the organizer to set tasks for each of the participants and monitor the implementation.
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Before embarking on the development of this application, Maurice conducted a study to understand what problems people face during a team search on the Internet. Among the main problems, she found an overrun of efforts, which could have been avoided if the course of work of each of the participants were more transparent.

According to Maurice, SearchTogether is designed to solve this problem by memorizing all the key phrases that participants enter into the search form, as well as all the comments that participants give about the pages found. In addition, the initiator of the search can distribute search tasks among the participants. For example, he can send half of the results of search results to process one participant, and send the other half to another. Thus, participants will not do the same job twice. If during the search, a new participant wants to connect to the common cause, he can also be invited to the team and familiarize himself with the already developed search phrases and the results obtained.

If participants are looking for both at the same time, they can use the special option “peek and follow”, which allows you to synchronously view the same pages, exchanging instant messages.

Maurice reports that he seeks to provide users with additional sorting of search results. For example, if a doctor and a driver begin to jointly look for information about health problems, the application will automatically send the doctor all the results that require special education.

Information Specialist and Technology Specialist at the University of Pennsylvania, Maidu Reedy, reports that while studying a team search for information, he often observes the same problems that Maurice describes. It is often possible to see how people have difficulties in order to synchronize the work of all participants, and then correctly present the overall results. The main difficulty is that during teamwork in real life, the main interaction is based on gestures. A good group search application should fill this flaw in gestures when, for example, participants want to tag some of the elements of a web page. Reedy also points to the need for a tool that would allow more experienced participants to help those who find it harder to navigate in an online environment.

Reedy states that it is important to understand that “in fact, we do not know how people carry out joint action - we are just starting to conduct field research.” He believes that such a tool should support different types of search. “When all team members are located in different parts of the world, their interaction takes entirely different forms than employees of the same company who are in the same building or office,” says Reedy. According to him, the application that Maurice is developing is well prepared for a mass user who needs to organize a remote command search. Reedy is also involved in the development of her own multi-user search engine.

However, the interests of Maurice in the field of team search are not limited to the functionality of SearchTogether. She is also developing an application that will allow you to do a team search from the same computer. The beta version of SearchTogether was released in late April.

Translation from English:
Roman Ravve

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