We believe that there are several reasons why these two features may not have been used by our study participants. The use of these features implies that one member of the group is the leader of the activity, and is sending information to the other group members; however, all of the participants in our study were completing a task as peers exploring social topics. We hypothesize that in a business/productivity scenario, especially in cases where one member of the group is of higher rank or position than others, these features might be used more often. The split and multi-engine search features were also intended to allow for collaboration among people of differing levels of search skill, such as by allowing a more expert searcher to compose a query while still involving other group members in exploring the results. However, all but one of the participants in our study were highly experienced searchers. The only pair for whom this was not true was the mother/son pair. The son is a software developer with a great deal of search experience, and the mother is a homemaker who said she searched the Web only a few times a week, when looking for recipes. The son, surprisingly, did not initiate any split or multi-engine searches during the study. When asked afterwards why he had not used those features, he explained that when he tried instant messaging his mother in order to let her know that he might send her information, she never replied, so he did not send her anything. (The mother was the only user in the study who did not send any instant messages; she later reported being confused by that feature.) The exploration of the
utility of split and multi-engine search in scenarios with different combinations of search skill merits further investigation