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. © Springer-Verlag 2012.