Collaborative World Wide Web browsing system through supplement of awareness

The difficulty in finding the required information in hypermedia is widely recognized. The awareness in the computer mediated communication is also considered to be important for collaborative work. We propose a collaborative browsing system that supplements awareness information and try to resolve the difficulty of information retrieval by inquiring and monitoring other users, which are the actions frequently taken when a user is faced with a problem. In this study, we built and evaluated a prototype to see whether the system is effective. As the result of the evaluation, we found that the environment in which we can get information of WWW browsing awareness enables us to feel the others´ presence and to grasp what the others are doing. Additionally, many subjects answered that they could browse the Web pages, which they did not know before. They also answered that they could increase the efficiency of browsing. We make a proposal about this collaboration browsing and present the results of experiments on its availability