Microsoft Research Community

SearchTogether, an IE7 plugin that enables collaboration on Web search, is now available for public download! 

SearchTogether can benefit any group of people who are interested in investigating a topic together, such as students working on a group report, colleagues working on a joint project, or friends planning a shared vacation or other social activities. SearchTogether supports both synchronous and asynchronous collaboration styles. SearchTogether's collaboration features include group query histories, split searching, page-level rating and commenting, automatically-generated shared summaries, peek-and-follow browsing, and integrated chat.

To download SearchTogether, visit the project's website at http://research.microsoft.com/searchtogether/. A tutorial is available at http://research.microsoft.com/searchtogether/tutorial.html.

This forum is intended as a place where SearchTogether users can post comments, feedback, and feature requests, and can meet and connect with others with whom they might wish to engage in a collaborative Web search.

Happy Searching!

- Merrie

I tried using SearchTogether and found it to be too slow. Entering keywords, chatting etc takes a lot of time. I'm using WinXp SP2, 1.6 GHz core 2 duo with 2GB RAM. Can you suggest any means to speed up the performance. 

Also the GUI doesn't contain the recommendation, page specific metadata features and the features available are not matching the palces in GUI mentioned in

http://research.microsoft.com/~merrie/papers/searchtogether.pdf

Can you suggest something for this? Are there different versions for WinXp and Vista?

Regards,

Saubhagya 

Hi Saubhagya,

Thanks for trying out SearchTogether and for posting feedback.

As you correctly noted, there are two versions of SearchTogether.  The original prototype, which is described in the ACM UIST 2007 paper that you linked to, differs in several ways from the public beta that was released in April.  For example, the original prototype was a specialized, standalone browser, while the current version works in conjunction with Internet Explorer.  The UIST paper describes a usability study conducted on the initial prototype; based on the findings of this study, we revised the design of SearchTogether in several ways, such as by adding the peek/follow features to provide additional awareness mechanisms.  Unfortunately, a few features from the original prototype, such as recommendations and visitation awareness, didn't make it into the current version; I'm glad to hear you were excited about those ideas, though -- they're definitely on the short list of things we'd like to add if we do an updated release.

As you also noted, the current release has some performance issues. We're aware of these issues, and those are also on the "next version wish list."  Even though SearchTogether isn't as polished as a finished product, we wanted to make it available as a free Beta to give people the opportunity to try out collaborative searching and get feedback about how we might improve the collaborative search experience in the future. Thanks for sharing your thoughts!

- Merrie

Hi Merrie,

really good innovation on the collaborative searching front. Could this product be cutomised in terms of the source data it searches?

regards,

Jay

Glad to hear you're enjoying SearchTogether!

Part of the idea behind SearchTogether is to enable search over a variety of sources, since the use of diverse sources by different group members is a common collaborative research strategy. This was part of the inspiration for the "multi-engine search" feature, although this feature is not fully fleshed-out in the current Beta.

The idea behind the "multi-engine search" feature is that one group member enters query terms, and can assign different sources to different group members; each group member would then receive the search results for that query from his/her assigned source. For example, if Andrea, Beth, and Chris were investigating treatments for asthma, they might perform a multi-engine search where Andrea received results from Pub Med medical search, Beth received results from a general-purpose Web search engine such as Live Search, and Chris received results from a reference such as Wikipedia. This would provide the group with a variety of perspectives on their target topic.

However, you have probably noticed that the current version of SearchTogether offers only general-purpose search engines (Live, Yahoo!, and Google) as source options for multi-engine search. Since the current release is a Beta, we didn't get a chance yet to integrate special-purpose search sources. The vision for SearchTogether is to have an extensible API such that users can add their own preferred search sources for a variety of specialized topics (travel, medicine, academic research, corporate intranets, etc.). Unfortunately, this is not yet implemented in the Beta release.

Thanks for the question!

- Merrie

Fantastic work Merrie!

For special purpose search sources, you may want to see the Mycroft Project at http://mycroft.mozdev.org/. They maintain a collection of more than 15,000 search engine plugins in standard XML-based formats.
Supporting an existing standard would enable you to use many of the search engine plugins already out there.


Cheers,

Nadav