Meredith “Merrie” Ringel Morris: Collaborative Searching
“We [Dr. Morris and her husband] had to transition from student life to “adulting” and needed to conduct extensive web searches to help find and furnish a home, purchase a car, and research local dog breeders. I realized that the process was highly inefficient; the two of us were performing many redundant searches, unaware of what the other had already discovered, and our email was becoming cluttered with links we sent back and forth.”
Dr. Morris is like all of us, conducting redundant web searches and filling our inboxes with unnecessary links. This redundancy of information was what led her to be interested in the idea of a collaborative web search, something she has a deep passion for and has published many papers about. Studies conducted by Dr. Morris and her collaborators showed that searching for information online could be enhanced by simultaneous querying either by search engines or multiple people (Morris et al., 2010; De Choudhury et al., 2014; Schwarz & Morris 2011).
A collaborative web search is a case when there is a one-to-one interaction between a user and a computer, however, individuals are helping the user with the search that is not interfacing with the computer. This is still very common even in the age of people having their laptop, PC, smartphone, etc (Morris et al., 2008). An example of this type of interface is at a school where several students can crowd around one person using a laptop. In this environment, Dr. Morris and Dr. Amershi created CoSearch.
CoSearch is a tool that provides explicit support for the people surrounding an individual at a computer in a space where computers are scarce. Its goal was to provide a better productive and engaging area for those who do not have easy access to the computer. These individuals would interface with the single computer via computer mice connected to the computer. Everyone would have a designated color on the screen and interactions with the system (like going to other pages or taking notes) would have web banners colored in their cursor color. In a study, CoSearch tried to address the limitations of the current space of co-located collaborative searches which they defined as difficulties in contributing because only one user interacts with the interface via a mouse and keyboard, lack of awareness of other people’s contributions, lack of hands-on learning on the part of those not directly interacting with the interface, differences in pacing rates for information gathering, contextual inferences based on the information, efficient division of labor, and information loss. To test the efficiency of CoSearch, researchers created three groups and tasked them to research three conditions in a set amount of time for each condition. The first condition is that only one group member interacts with the computer; the second condition being all group members have a computer; the third condition is the use of CoSearch. Users preferred having their own devices, but CoSearch is for situations where that is not possible and of the total 36 participants 11 preferred CoSearch while only 7 participants preferred co-located collaborative search (Amershi & Morris 2008) which was their intent.
In the same sphere, Dr. Morris and Dr. Horvitz created a remote version of CoSearch called SearchTogether (Morris & Horvitz, 2007). This software supports asynchronous and synchronous collaboration. As compared to CoSearch, SearchTogether requires that other users have their devices to work collaboratively while searching the internet. The limitations SearchTogether tried to address were Awareness of other group members’ contributions to a search, efficient division of labor, and persistence in the sense that communication and processes will sync with other group members. A study by Morris and Horwitz, recruited 14 participants in pairs of two and asked them to complete a self-assigned task in 20 minutes. A questionnaire about their experience with SearchTogether was given to each individual. During these activities, the individuals were not allowed to talk to each other. They found that SearchTogether enhanced awareness of users conducting regular internet tasks and users had an easier time delegating tasks. Because this was a single instance of use, persistence could not be accurately measured.
Though this work was done nearly two decades ago and their uses may not have a place in technologically developed countries, I can see aspects of CoSearch and especially SearchTogether in modern-day technology. Google Drive allows for synchronous collaboration on documents, spreadsheets, and presentations remotely. Dr. Morris’ work could have been the foundation for these companies and entities to create these and many more types of synchronous displays. The next big step in this field could be finding a fault in one of these current systems, just like Dr. Morris.
Bibliography
Morris, Meredith Ringel, Jaime Teevan, and Katrina Panovich. “A comparison of information seeking using search engines and social networks.” Fourth International AAAI Conference on Weblogs and Social Media. 2010.
De Choudhury, Munmun, Meredith Ringel Morris, and Ryen W. White. “Seeking and sharing health information online: comparing search engines and social media.” Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on human factors in computing systems. 2014.
Schwarz, Julia, and Meredith Morris. “Augmenting web pages and search results to support credibility assessment.” Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on human factors in computing systems. 2011.
Morris, Meredith Ringel. “A survey of collaborative web search practices.” Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on human factors in computing systems. 2008.
Amershi, Saleema, and Meredith Ringel Morris. “CoSearch: a system for co-located collaborative web search.” Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on human factors in computing systems. 2008.
Morris, Meredith Ringel, and Eric Horvitz. “SearchTogether: an interface for collaborative web search.” Proceedings of the 20th annual ACM symposium on User interface software and technology. 2007.
