Exploiting collective intelligence for asynchronous collaborative search

As information and telecommunication technologies advance at a rapid pace recently, network services have already become an inseparable part of one's daily life for many people. Web search is then undoubtedly a major entry of the Internet for most users when acquiring information, especially for mobile users. However, the recent research direction of this field is too much focused on the improvement of personalized search. We thus propose in this work an idea of collaborative search to reflect the collective intelligence of colleagues working on the same work, students taking the same course, friends planning an upcoming trip and so on. With a proper cooperation, users may work together during their search process in an efficient way even if they are not familiar with their search target. Also, it is noted that users may conduct their search activities in different time and places. We emphasize such an asynchronous style of collaborative search and especially address the features of integration and planning in this work. Moreover, several usage scenarios are developed to verify the feasibility of the proposed technique in accomplishing collaborative search.