Collaborative Search

As law schools explore more team learning (though they’ve a long way to go to get to the Business School small group culture), the possibility of collaborative tools becomes more important. Remember the line from Google’s Joe Kraus that “”the nature of information discovery is changing … from a solitary activity to a social one”.

That’s why a posting on the Italian blog Programmazione.it v6.0 beta caught our attention. A post on a tool for group collaboration, describing a free Internet Explorer plug-in that allows groups of people to collaborate on Web searches . The features include include group query histories, split searching, page-level rating and commenting, automatically-generated shared summaries, peek-and-follow browsing, and integrated chat. More details on each of these features can be found at the SearchTogether tutorial.

For the technically inclined, there’s a good research report on the thinking that went into the design of the tool. The rest of us can read the Washington Post.

Some critics have described the concept as about as useful as collaborative spell-checking.

I’m not sure that it’s going to nudge me away from Firefox 3.01.