Often people work in teams to find information on the Web e.g. team of students working on a class project, members of a research group writing a paper, geographically distributed teams of programmers searching for help on forums, corporate research departments writing market surveys or reports, online shopping with family or planning a trip with friends. Typically people collaborate via ad-hoc means, such as sharing links over email or IM, or sharing tags on social bookmarking services.

FindAlong.com is a firefox plugin that enables teams of people to search together. You can start a "search session" with your team and start adding pages. Everyone is kept notified in real-time about searches performed by others in the group, pages added by a team member, comments on pages added by others, instant messages to team members etc. When "labels" are enabled within a session, each added page is automatically tagged with the query against which the page was added (avoiding duplication of work within team members) and helping organize the information.

You can also use the findAlong "search sessions" to organize your own research (and don't want to keep tagging each page with the same tag-name or invent awkward naming conventions to store relationships between tagged pages). You can email your sessions to friends, access them from the findAlong website or even post them as a bundle on delicious.

We are still tinkering with the UI, but it'd be great if people here can try out the extension and give us some feedback. You can also write to me directly at [email protected].

Thanks, -Umar