June: an agent-based metasearch engine for collaborative student groups

On many groups activities students need to individually search material available on the web. Although many of the results obtained by each of them are repeated, each result must be analyzed to determine its usefulness, and this entails considerable time and effort. To solve this problem JUNE, an agent-based metasearch engine that enables collaborative web search for groups of students, was developed. The application indicates which member evaluated each result, and it also allows assigning a personal assessment and associating a comment. The results produced by the individual searches are sorted by the metasearcher using a ranking algorithm that considers a group valuation obtained by averaging the individual valuations. Currently, JUNE is being used by groups of university students.