Study # 06-11620

Understanding 6Search Users´ Behavior and Emerging Network in a Realistic Setting

You are invited to participate in a research study. The purpose of this study is to understand how people use 6Search and how the 6Search network evolves with users´ activities.

6Search (6S) is an application, which will help you create your personal Web index, search it, share it, and discover what others have shared. You can build your index by importing your bookmarks, crawling the Web, or collecting pages you find interesting. Once you have a personal Web index, you can find what you have through keyword search. More importantly, you can search what other 6S users (peers) have indexed through the peer search feature. When you submit a query for peer search, your 6S application will determine which peers are best suited to answer your query based on previous query-response experience. It will then forward your query to those peers. Your 6S will also learn from the results received from other peers so that it can better forward your queries in the future.

The objective of this user study is to evaluate the performance of 6Search and find out what should be done to improve 6Search. To achieve these goals, we need to gather usage information from the real users.

To participate in this study, you will be asked to use a special version of 6S created for this study. When this application is running, it will record the following information.

The above information will be transmitted through a secure channel once a day until the end of the study no later than Dec 31, 2007. Afterward, the application will not record or transmit any of your information.

Typically, we would like to encourage you to use 6S as often as possible during the data collection phase if possible.

The information gathered will help us improve 6S. In addition, results of this study will provide the first user model created from real users´ information for P2P Web search research. This study will also serve as the first user study conducted in the area of P2P Web search.

When you start the application for the first time, the application will create a random unique ID, which cannot be used to identify your identity. The ID is only used to distinguish the source of the information. Therefore, it is not possible to identify you from the information we collect.

The information collected from you will be stored on a server in the computer science department of Indiana University, Bloomington, US. The server is configured such that only the investigators can access your data. To protect your information from eavesdroppers during transmission to our server, the information will be sent through a secure channel.

If you have questions at any time about the study or the procedures, you may contact the researcher,

Ruj Akavipat at Eigenmann Hall Room 914, (812) 857-9707, rakavipa@cs.indiana.edu

If you feel you have not been treated according to the descriptions in this form, or your rights as a participant in research have been violated during the course of this project, you may contact the office for the Indiana University Bloomington Human Subjects Committee, Carmichael Center L03, 530 E. Kirkwood Ave., Bloomington, IN 47408, 812/855-3067, by e-mail at iub_hsc@indiana.edu.

Your participation in this study is voluntary; you may refuse to participate without penalty. If you decide to participate, you may withdraw from the study at any time without penalty and without loss of benefits to which you are otherwise entitled. To withdraw from the study, you can do one of the following:

IRB Approved

Approval Date: December 6, 2007

Expires: December 5, 2008