CoFox: A Synchronous Collaborative Browser

Abstract

Search activities are evolving to new ways and many search activities are conducted collaboratively. This paper introduces the development and evaluation of a synchronous collaborative web browsing system called CoFox. CoFox provides a platform to allow a pair of users to tackle collaborative search tasks. We introduce the architecture of the system and the important components of such a system. A user-centred evaluation was conducted and the results are presented here. We hypothesise that using CoFox to perform collaborative tasks will result in higher user satisfaction, effectiveness and in gaining access to a higher number of relevant results at an earlier state when compared to systems designed for individual web search. The results of a user evaluation carried out by eighteen pairs of users, showed that the hypotheses hold, thus confirming that the system enhances the results achieved during web searching.