On the Development of a Collaborative Search System

Collaborative search is an active area of research in the IR community (and has been for many years)—despite this, there is a lack of open-source tools available to jump-start research in collaborative search. It is common for collaborative search researchers to implement their own tooling, leading to unnecessary duplicate engineering efforts. In this work, we describe the design process and challenges in implementing SearchX, an open-source collaborative search system, built using modern Web standards. SearchX implements essential features of collaborative search as found in the literature. In the design process, we focused on providing support for modern research needs (such as running crowdsourcing experiments and fast prototyping). We open-sourced SearchX https://github.com/felipemoraes/searchx-frontend (front-end) and https://github.com/felipemoraes/searchx-backend (back-end).