Collaborative information seeking by the numbers

In this paper, we present results of an on-line survey conducted in early 2010 to inquire about collaborative information seeking activities and behaviors in the context of Web searches. We recruited participants using the Amazon Mechanical Turk service to gather responses from people with a wide range of backgrounds. We present results about the frequency of collaborative Web searches, number of sessions involved, concurrency, location, collaborative group size, and communication methods used to collaborate. We draw comparisons with prior work and highlight collaborative search scenarios that are important for tools and systems to support