September 5, 2008 at 13:49Team search will do without gestures
- Transfer
Microsoft has developed a team web search application.
Despite the fact that all kinds of webdanol applications continue to flourish with terry colors, many of the most popular Internet tools are used without outside participation. “Such tools are designed so that people can use them without outside help, but this is not always a good solution,” said a researcher from the group Adaptive Systems and Interactions at Microsoft ResearchMiridith Maurice. You can often see how people who are looking for something together on the Internet — whether they are spouses planning a joint trip, or students doing some group assignment — do the same work that their comrades have already done or not may find a site that others have discovered. Maurice is developing an application that should help more effectively conduct a team search on the network. SearchTogether
Toolhelps to conduct searches for a group of people, regardless of whether they are on the network at the same time or are 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 participate in a group Web search. The tool monitors the progress of the entire group, allowing the organizer to set tasks for each of the participants and monitor the progress.
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 over-expenditure of efforts that could have been avoided if the course of work of each of the participants had been more transparent.
According to Maurice, SearchTogether is designed to solve this problem by remembering all the key phrases that the participants enter in the search form, as well as all the comments that the participants give about the pages found. In addition, the initiator of the search can distribute the search tasks among the participants. For example, he can send half the results of search results to one participant and send the other half to another. Thus, participants will not do the same job twice. If during the search process, a new participant wants to join the common cause, he can also be invited to the team and familiarize himself with already worked out search phrases and the results obtained.
If the participants are looking at the same time, they can use the special option “peek and follow”, which allows you to synchronously view the same pages while exchanging instant messages.
Maurice says he seeks to provide users with additional sorting options for search results. For example, if a doctor and a driver begin to jointly search for information about health problems, the application will automatically send the doctor all the results that require special education.
University of Pennsylvania Information Services and Technology Specialist Maidu Reedy reports that when studying team search for information, he often observes the same problems that Maurice describes. You can often see how people are having difficulty synchronizing the work of all participants, and then correctly presenting the overall results. The main difficulty is that in team work in real life, the main interaction is based on gestures. A good group search application should fill this lack of gestures when, for example, participants want to mark some element of a web page. Reedy also points out the need for a tool that would allow more experienced participants to help those who find it more difficult to navigate the online environment.
Reedy states that it’s important to understand that “in fact, we don’t know how people work together - we’re just starting to do field research.” He believes that such a tool should support different types of searches. “When all team members are located in different parts of the world, their interaction takes on completely different forms than employees of the same company located in the same building or office,” says Reedy. According to him, the application that Maurice is developing has been successfully prepared for the mass user who needs to organize a remote team search. Reedy is also involved in the development of her own multi-user search engine.
However, Maurice’s team search interests are not limited to SearchTogether’s functionality. She is also developing an application that will allow team searching from the same computer. SearchTogether beta was released in late April.
Translation from English:
Roman Ravve
Specially for
worldwebstudio
Despite the fact that all kinds of webdanol applications continue to flourish with terry colors, many of the most popular Internet tools are used without outside participation. “Such tools are designed so that people can use them without outside help, but this is not always a good solution,” said a researcher from the group Adaptive Systems and Interactions at Microsoft ResearchMiridith Maurice. You can often see how people who are looking for something together on the Internet — whether they are spouses planning a joint trip, or students doing some group assignment — do the same work that their comrades have already done or not may find a site that others have discovered. Maurice is developing an application that should help more effectively conduct a team search on the network. SearchTogether
Toolhelps to conduct searches for a group of people, regardless of whether they are on the network at the same time or are 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 participate in a group Web search. The tool monitors the progress of the entire group, allowing the organizer to set tasks for each of the participants and monitor the progress.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 over-expenditure of efforts that could have been avoided if the course of work of each of the participants had been more transparent.
According to Maurice, SearchTogether is designed to solve this problem by remembering all the key phrases that the participants enter in the search form, as well as all the comments that the participants give about the pages found. In addition, the initiator of the search can distribute the search tasks among the participants. For example, he can send half the results of search results to one participant and send the other half to another. Thus, participants will not do the same job twice. If during the search process, a new participant wants to join the common cause, he can also be invited to the team and familiarize himself with already worked out search phrases and the results obtained.
If the participants are looking at the same time, they can use the special option “peek and follow”, which allows you to synchronously view the same pages while exchanging instant messages.
Maurice says he seeks to provide users with additional sorting options for search results. For example, if a doctor and a driver begin to jointly search for information about health problems, the application will automatically send the doctor all the results that require special education.
University of Pennsylvania Information Services and Technology Specialist Maidu Reedy reports that when studying team search for information, he often observes the same problems that Maurice describes. You can often see how people are having difficulty synchronizing the work of all participants, and then correctly presenting the overall results. The main difficulty is that in team work in real life, the main interaction is based on gestures. A good group search application should fill this lack of gestures when, for example, participants want to mark some element of a web page. Reedy also points out the need for a tool that would allow more experienced participants to help those who find it more difficult to navigate the online environment.
Reedy states that it’s important to understand that “in fact, we don’t know how people work together - we’re just starting to do field research.” He believes that such a tool should support different types of searches. “When all team members are located in different parts of the world, their interaction takes on completely different forms than employees of the same company located in the same building or office,” says Reedy. According to him, the application that Maurice is developing has been successfully prepared for the mass user who needs to organize a remote team search. Reedy is also involved in the development of her own multi-user search engine.
However, Maurice’s team search interests are not limited to SearchTogether’s functionality. She is also developing an application that will allow team searching from the same computer. SearchTogether beta was released in late April.
Translation from English:
Roman Ravve
Specially for
worldwebstudio