CoZpace: A proposal for collaborative web search for sharing search records and interactions

Today's search systems are mainly designed for one user to use individually. Search activities in practice can, however, be conducted by two or more users working together. This is due to the fact that information seeking tasks are complex and often requires multiple users' efforts to collaboratively assess and search for relevant information. In some tasks, there is a large amount of information to search or such information requires human intelligence to judge whether it is relevant to information needs. This paper introduces the development of collaborative search system, named “CoZpace”. CoZpace is a Web-based application, which allows a pair or a group of users to create a collaborative search task. Within the created task, a user can invite and communicate with other members in a group, share search history records, and mark search results considered relevant. We also propose a newly developed feature, called “snapboard”, to support collaborative search activities. With the snapboard, users are allowed to take a snapshot of a part of focused information in a Web site and then share it among collaborators on a display board. A user can mark it as relevant or comment it for further reviews of other collaborators.