Collaborative search, also called collaborative information seeking, or collaborative information search, belongs to collaborative information behavior, which stands for activities that a group or team of people undertakes to identify and resolve a shared information need[1]. Collaborative search has two major components: it should include a group or team of people, and since it is a searching process, it should also focus on resolving an information need. So collaborative search can be defined as a searching process that involve a group of people who collaborate with each other in order to solve an information need.
Key concepts
editCollaboration
editCollaboration is one of the key concepts towards better understanding of collaborative search and its characteristics. Lots of researchers have tried to define or describe collaboration. In general, collaboration is a joint decision-making process, and the parties who see different aspects of a problem can constructively explore their differences and search for solutions that go beyond their own limited vision of what is possible[2]. Collaboration should be a decision-making process that everyone in the group should participate, while group members should be aware of their differences, such as different levels of expertise. Another important factor in collaboration is that people work together to bring up a solution that is more than the sum of each participant's contribution[3].
Communication in collaboration is a salient medium that directly impacts the efficiency of collaborating and the qualities of outcomes. One famous theory identified four types of communication medium according to their degree of richness: face-to-face, video, audio, and computer-mediated text transfers[4]. Different kinds of collaboration calls for different kinds of communication media. For instance, text transfers is appropriate for generating ideas, while video outperforms others in judgement task but too much for idea generation[5]. Besides communication types, there are also mainly two types of communication styles: task oriented and socially oriented[6]. The differences are task oriented communication is more about finishing a task, and more technical than social oriented communication, where the focus is on satisfying the emotional needs of people in collaboration. Lots of research also tried to deal with the problem of distinguishing between task oriented and socially oriented communications[7][8].
Some researchers tried to identify factors that affect collaboration. Under general setting, there are six major categories of factors: Environment, Membership, Process/Structure, Communications, Purpose, and Resources[9]. Among those categories there are 19 specific factors, where Mutual respect, understanding and trust, and Appropriate cross-section of members are two of the mostly mentioned factors. Other factors include Skilled convener, History of collaboration or cooperation, Members share a stake in both process and outcome, Multiple layers of decision-making, and so on. There are also studies on impact factors in academic collaboration, more specifically remote scientific collaboration. Those factors are nature of work, common ground, collaboration readiness, technology readiness, and management/planning/decision making[10].
Team and teamwork
editA team is often a group of people explicitly collaborate towards a common goal[11]. Teams usually have the following unique characteristics: they include multiple sources of information, tasks are inter-dependent, teams need coordination among team members, they have common and valued goals, as well as intensive communication, and adaptive strategies to help respond to change[12].
Different from taskwork , which is performed by individual team members, teamwork is more related to interactions among team members to achieve their common goals[13]. Teamwork is affected by team functioning and task outcome, and is also composed of a relatively stable set of behaviors and cognitive processes[14]. Major components of teamwork include communication, team orientation, team leadership, monitoring, feedback, backup, and coordination[15]. Collaboration is a process of teamwork, thus it inherits most of teamwork's characteristics, including its major processes, which include categories of action phase, transition phase, and interpersonal process[16].
Impact factors
editPeople related factors
editPeople is the most important component in collaborative search, because it is people who formulate a group or team, collaborate with each other to solve an information need, and it is also impossible to issue an information need without people. There are lots of people related factors that affect people who are involving in collaborative search processes, including group size, age, roles of users, affective signals, communication styles, and so on. Different factors impact collaborative search in various ways, and there are not any research showing which set of factors is optimal for collaborative information seeking yet. The best setting of people related factors should depend on specific tasks, as well as characters of team members. Overall collaborative search participants are expected to fully consider the tradeoff between costs and benefits, and fulfill their tasks in an effective manner.
Search related factors
editIt is hard to define the boundary between search side factors and people related factors in collaborative search. If search related factors are decomposed into detailed explanations, they would finally affect people participating in collaborative search thus can be categorized as people related factors in the end. So search related factors are actually process-related. On the contrary, people factors are more about participants, and they are closely related to people's characteristics. Examples of search related factors include synchronized or unsynchronized systems, co-located and remotely located, devices used, and some other. To select among those options, people should also consider specific problems they are facing, and their teams they are working with. There are some trends in impact factors though, including search related ones. For instance, with the rapid development of advanced devices, people are now using more smartphones and tablets rather than TVs or projectors[17]. Also, people feel more comfortable with communication tools that they have been used before for future collaborative search[17].
Other factors
editBesides the factors mentioned above, there are many other factors that impact collaborative search processes. Those factors include software people use to collaborate, working environment when people do collaborative search, and so on. Software is a difficult to write about since there are no collaborative search systems that are very popular and dominating like Google. Comparing to other factors, software seems to be the most difficult to tackle with, but also the most promising factor. Just like Marti said, "The fact that no user interface for collaborative searching has yet caught fire suggests that the best parts of the design space have yet to be investigated".[18]
Technologies
editFront-end design
editDesigning a functional yet not overwhelming user interface for collaborative information search is one of the challenges in this field. There have been past practices on building a separate new system for collaborative search, but it turns out the best idea would be building upon current search engines rather than persuading users to give up their most visited search websites. There are several supports a successful collaborative search system should have, including support for communication among group members, awareness of group progress, and sharing information among group members. The front-end design should also consider costs and benefits of achieving those supports. The great success of Google indicates that a simple and neat user interface is more welcomed by users. Also, although there are not enough good examples for case studies in collaborative search, developers can still borrow ideas from search engines, collaboration platforms, and chat software where they contain the focus on search processes, sharing information among team members, and support for communication. Good examples include Google, Bing, Box, Microsoft Team, and WeChat.
Back-end algorithm
editAlgorithmic support for collaborative search mainly happens in the back-end of such systems. Such technologies include role-based mediation, collaborative querying and ranking, and so on. For role-based techniques, researchers tried to design different interfaces or systems according to different roles of people in collaboration. Examples include Cerchiamo, which implemented the roles of Prospector and Minor and provided different interfaces to coordinate their activities[19]. Collaborative querying is the process of users issuing queries based on information of previous queries others have made, and latter users are able to benefit from those. Collaborative ranking works in the same way, where search results of users are re-ranked by considering all other people's preferences belong to the group. HeyStaks provide such services that are still available now. The mechanism of it is to use community preferences to modify the ranking of search results retrieved from popular search engines[20]. The purpose of all those technologies including algorithms is to provide more effective search processes inside groups, and to help team members retrieve more satisfying results in a faster way.
Future expectations
editCollaborative search is a process that has been ignored by most users of search engines for years. People need collaboration more and more in both study and work, and during working as a team people search for other resources all the time. However, most users still are not familiar with existing collaborative search systems. The reasons are complicated. First of all, it means that no collaborative search systems have a good design that can be widely accepted by users. It is believed that the best collaborative search should not focus on moving users to another brand new system, rather than building upon users' current search preferences. On the other hand, since some search engines are dominating in this market, it is truly a difficult task to persuade users to use collaborative search systems, and people now also tend to use other ways to collaborate, such as through building shared documents. This also calls for an outstanding collaborative search system, that can benefit users significantly more than other collaborating approaches, and provide a comfortable user interface that won't degrade user experience.
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