Collaborative Search Engines: Toward a Meta-Design for Improving the User Experience

Prior research has shown that search engine users are working groups to collaborate on search tasks, but that they are not completely satisfied with the current generation of search engine's ability to support their collaborative needs (Morris, 2008). This research takes a design science approach (Hevner et al, 2004) to solving the problem. The Computer Supported Cooperative Work research is studied to discover a set of features best suited to supporting collaborative search, then based on this feature set a meta-design for a search engine is proposed. Furthermore, a set of contingencies is proposed to suggest when certain collaborative features will become more useful. An empirical experiment is set up to test the perceived usefulness of both a search engine that satisfies the meta-design and a current generation search engine.