Search

Discussion articles

  • 8 quick ways to fix your search engine
    Over the past year, we've evaluated the search experiences on a number of popular content sites. We focused on content sites, rather than e-commerce or web applications, and we avoided general web search engines entirely.Our finding, not surprisingly, is that almost every site’s search engine could use improvement. Through our research, we discovered eight quick fixes that will improve your site’s search experience.

  • After the dot-bomb: getting web information retrieval right this time
    In the excitement of the "dot-com" rush of the 1990s, many websites were developed that provided information retrieval capabilities poorly or sub-optimally. Suggestions are made for improvements in the design of web information retrieval in seven areas. Classifications, ontologies, indexing vocabularies, statistical properties of databases and staff indexing support systems are all discussed.

  • Are there users who always search?
    Web designers often tell us that they spend a great deal of their limited time and resources working to improve their on-site search engines because, they believe, there are some people who always rely on the search engine to reach their target content.

  • Ask Jeeves and urinating canines
    First, there were butlers.  Then, there were search engines.  Today, there is Jeeves, a hybrid less expensive than the former and more user-friendly than the latter.  Others have followed in Jeeves's footsteps, but his loafers are hard to fill.  While he is no longer an original, he continues to be invaluable for net-novices and net-addicts alike.

  • Be a white hat SEO for your intranet - it's good for accessibility
    "SEO means Search Engine Optimiser. Some are white hats; some are black hats. Just like in the old Wild West! The SEOs with white hats conduct legitimate optimising of web pages to make the site come up appropriately in the Search Engine Results Pages. The back hat SEOs implement tricks to appear high in the results pages even if the web site is not necessarily relevant. The range of tricks is astonishing (many infringe copyright) and when search engines detect them, the site is usually thrown out of their index database. I soon realised that (1) most of the techniques used by white hat SEOs were similar if not identical to the guidelines given by accessibility experts. The very things you do to make your web site more search-engine friendly also make it more accessible. (2) These guidelines can also be applied to intranets."
    (Jane McConnell - Globally Local, Locally Global)

  • Best practices and future visions for search user interfaces
    A useful collection of papers from the CHI2003 conference workshop on search user interfaces.

  • Better search engine design: beyond algorithms
    A useful search engine is more than a search algorithm. This article explains how to create a search query analysis tool, a best bets feature, and a basic controlled vocabulary.

  • Designing a search people can really use (PDF)
    Creating a good search engine for a website, documentation, or intranet starts with a good understanding of people
    and how they look for information.

  • Designing for search engines and stars
    Great search engine placement doesn't require you to sacrifice appealing design. While "content is king" for high search engine rankings as well as overall site popularity, your imagination and creativity with designs can still reach for the stars.

  • Designing your website to be search engine friendly
    "In this article I intend to outline three techniques through which you should be able to design impressive web sites with both style and substance, that allow your content to naturally rank well without compromising the visual aesthetics of your site."
    (Martin Belam)

  • Do you "google"? Understanding search engine use beyond the hype
    Much anecdotal evidence suggests that Google is the most popular search engine. However, such claims are rarely backed up by data. The reasons for this are manifold, including the difficulty in measuring search engine popularity and the multiple ways in which the concept can be understood. Here, I discuss the sources of confusion related to search engine popularity. It is problematic to make unfounded assumptions about general users’ search engine choices because by doing so we exclude a large number of people from our discussions about systems development and our understanding of how the average user finds information online.

  • E-commerce search report
    "Learn how 25 top online retailers handle misspellings, synonyms, hyphenation, plurals, and other real-world search queries. Plus, this report is full of ideas, insights, and 22 best practices to help you make your site's search results more useful. In this detailed report, 37signals analyzes, reviews, and rates the search engines and search results at 25 popular e-commerce sites."
    (37 Signals)

  • Effective search results
    Search result pages must make information easy to find and present results in a format that is easy to use.

  • Employee directory search: resolving conflicting usability guidelines
    Guidelines conflict on whether to limit intranet search to a single search box or dedicate an additional box to employee directory searches. There's theory to support both guidelines. So which guideline do we follow?

  • Enhanced thumbnails
    How much time do you spend searching for information? You probably spend a lot of time looking through documents, like search engine results or files on your hard drive. To make it easier to search for information in documents, researchers at PARC have developed enhanced thumbnails.

  • Faceted metadata search and browse
    There is no single way to provide navigation for everyone: users have such disparate needs. Traditional field-based or parametric search engines for structured data have used a command line or provided a form to fill out, but these require a lot of knowledge on the searcher's side. Full text search wipes out the value of the metadata. A good solution to these problems involves exposing the facets in dynamic taxonomies, so that the search user can see exactly the options they have available at any time.

  • Federated searching: a viable alternative to web surfing
    A possible solution to the Google-only research approach is making its way into schools via library media center automation systems. Imagine searching your local library media center and other library collections, websites, and subscription databases with a single click of the mouse.

  • Findability hacks
    "In most organizations, findability falls through the cracks. Web site search engines return lousy results because designers and engineers don’t collaborate to fine-tune the relevance ranking algorithms. Dazzling product catalogs wallow in obscurity because marketing and engineering can’t work together on search engine optimization. And navigation systems fall short because information architects and brand architects fail to map marketing jargon to the vocabulary of users. Time after time, findability falls through the cracks between roles and responsibilities, and everybody loses. For all these reasons, findability merits special attention."
    (Peter Morville)

  • Fine-tuning your enterprise search - how to get the best results to your users
    I'd like to outline four areas where I believe that with straightforward techniques you can fine tune your search systems, to get the best performance out of them in a way that represents value for money, and which ultimately leads to better results for users.
    (Martin Belam)

  • Generating simple URLs for search engines
    Search engines generally use robot crawlers to locate searchable pages on web sites and intranets. These robots, which use the same requests and responses as web browsers, read pages and follow links on those pages to locate every page on the specified servers. Search engine robots follow standard links with slashes, but not dynamic pages, generated from databases or content management systems using question marks (?) and other command punctuation such as &, %, + and $.

  • Good search is knowledge management
    "One of the key goals of knowledge management is to ensure that staff have the information they need, at the time they need it. What has often been overlooked is that effective search can play a key role in meeting this need, beyond just allowing staff to 'find stuff'. Implementing a good search solution can help knowledge managers build their understanding of staff needs, can raise the visibility of key information, and can help staff to better understand what they are looking for."
    (James Robertson - Step Two Designs)

  • Half web searchers enter one query, look at one page of results
    Over 66% of searchers examine fewer than five results with more than one in three web searchers viewing only on one document in a given session. Users' search strategies are not those believed traditionally effective, but a close analysis reveals they work well on the web.

  • How search can help you understand your audience
    A short article on how looking at search logs can help understand the user's vocabulary and issues where search might not return the results they are expecting.

  • IA heuristics for search systems
    Lou Rosenfeld suggests some information architecture heuristics for evaluating search systems.

  • Improve the usability of search results pages
    "Product search is the cornerstone of many Web applications. A user's ability to select what he or she is looking for among millions of search results can make or break the user experience. A cluttered search-results page that is missing the essential filtering and sorting controls squanders customer loyalty and bankrupts sales revenue. In this article, Greg Nudelman demonstrates how to create effective and easy-to-use search-results pages by providing sophisticated yet intuitive filtering and sorting controls."
    (Greg Nudelman - Java World)

  • Improving intranet search
    "This report provides a practical methodology for improving intranet search, including a wide range of guidelines and approaches that cover every aspect of the search solution. All of the recommendations are designed to be within the reach of every intranet team, and do not require in-depth technical knowledge or unlimited budgets."
    Note: report must be purchased.
    (James Robertson - Step Two Designs)

  • Improving search usability
    "Searching is a crucial feature in any website, but often developers don't make it as easy to use as it could be. Here we offer guidelines for the three main search components: search controls, the search returns, and metadata."
    (John Wood - IQ Content)

  • In defense of search
    Jared Spool loves to slander search. He says "searching stinks." He proclaims it's "worse than nothing." He exhorts web designers to "keep users from using search." And he backs up these defamatory accusations with $3,000,000 worth of user research data. Is Jared right? Do his research results tell the whole truth and nothing but the truth? Is browsing better than searching? No, no, and no!

  • In search of better search results
    Moore's Law posits that transistor density on integrated circuits doubles every couple of years. Similarly, there is a doubling of data every nine months and continued exponential growth in the size of the worldwide web. Fortunately, Moore's Law and assumed, unnamed corollaries to it keep storage on a track to handle the increasing load at consistently improving speeds and costs. On the other hand, finding what you want on the web or in data warehouses is not improving rapidly, despite the increasing speed at which terabytes and even petabytes can be scanned for relevant results.

  • Intranet portals and scent are made for each other
    "On intranets, the pull to use search is stronger, since it promises an easy way to drive users directly to their content. However, our research shows that users only resort to search when they can't find the trigger words on the page. They turn to search, typing in a query representing the scent they had hoped to find -- in essence creating their own links. Search logs are a great way to identify what scent is missing from your portal. When going through the logs, you want to look at both the queries and the pages from which those queries originated. The scent is telling you where the scent is lost and what link the user desired."
    (Jared M Spool - User Interface Engineering)

  • Intranet search reports
    A range of statistics are typically gathered on intranet usage, but of these, search engine reports are by far the most useful. This briefing explores two key search engine reports that should be implemented on all intranets, and looks at how they can be used to improve the effectiveness of the site.

  • It's not just about searching, it's about findability
    Enterprise search cannot be taken out of context from other routes to information discovery. There are three ways in which information discovery can be accomplished in a web environment. The first is through lists that adorn the left-hand side of most intranets and websites, which attempt to categorise information. The second is through hyperlinks, and the third is through a search engine. In the case of websites, lists and hyperlinks are probably about equally important with search being an afterthought.

  • It's the content, stupid: search engine optimization
    "The words people use when searching are the ultimate distillation of what they care about. Search is an activity that strips things down to their essential meaning. If you want to be successful at being found by people who search, you must use their carewords, not yours. The customer controls the message today. It is their language that dictates the communication. You must use their words, not yours, if you want to be found."
    (Gerry McGovern)

  • Less is more in web search interfaces for older adults
    "We have previously found the elderly users to face several usability problems with the current search engines. Thus, we designed an elderly–friendly search interface, Etsin. To evaluate the success of the design, a usability study was conducted for comparing the usability of Etsin and Google. The participants faced fewer usability problems when using Etsin than Google and they valued the clarity of the Etsin interface. In conclusion, elderly users benefit from a simplified search engine interface that is easy to understand and that takes into account age–related issues."
    (Anne Aula, Mika Kaki)

  • Linking vs searching: guidelines for use
    This article summarises a quick survey of the available literature on linking and searching. The findings are organised into a series of observations and guidelines that may be helpful to designers dealing with similar issues.

  • Live search explained
    "Trend: Live search will gradually replace traditional search in web applications. As mainstream programs such as Windows Vista matures up to release, and live search is deeply integrated, we can expect more web pages implementing live search. Apple’s Spotlight and MSN Desktop Search uses the same Live search paradigm that we’ll probably see a lot more in the year to come."
    (Jesper Rønn-Jensen)

  • Mental models for search are getting firmer
    "Users now have precise expectations for the behavior of search. Designs that invoke this mental model but work differently are confusing."
    (Jakob Nielsen)

  • Metadata and search
    A summary of a workshop on metadata and search from the 2003 Dublin Core Conference. Links to presentations used in the workshop are provided.

  • Metasearch and usability: towards a seamless interface to library resources (PDF)
    Access to library resources, particularly digital library resources, has become increasingly unmanageable for users, and increasingly complex even for librarians. At present, library users must navigate a bewildering array of electronic resources provided by numerous vendors using multiple search protocols. And resources keep coming. So far, no clearly superior solution has emerged. The approaches proposed by vendors and research organisations are evolving and will continue to do so. One of the most promising solutions to libraries' widening thicket of resources and our wandering users is the notion of a metasearch tool.

  • Needle – haystack + you: how undergraduates search and use the Internet (PDF)
    This paper considers the current trends in information literacy in higher education and presents some of the results of a survey of incoming college freshmen that sought to measure their information literacy in the area of Internet use.

  • New ideas for web searches (PDF)
    Advice on choosing the most appropriate search engine and a list of tips for using search engines.

  • Nine ways to fix intranet search
    "Search is often the greatest source of frustration on intranets. Irrelevant results, hard to read results pages and 'untitled document' entries plague many intranet searches. This article outlines nine steps that can be taken by all intranet teams to improve the effectiveness of search. References are made to previous articles that outline specific steps in greater detail."
    (James Robertson - Step Two Designs)

  • Of cereal and search: improving customer experience with selective search engine optimization
    "If your site is like most, there are probably places that are better for users to enter than others. Of course, it all depends on the user's goal. This is exactly why you need to customize your optimization efforts for each individual page of your web site. Some pages are going to require (and deserve) a lot more effort. These are the pages you really want to put front and center for your users to find."
    (Eric G Myers)

  • On search, the series
    This series of essays on the construction, deployment and use of search technology was written between June and December of 2003. It has fifteen instalments.

  • On beyond help
    More information is going online, and that information is more critical to both business and personal lives. In the work place, everything from human resource information to procedure manuals are on the corporate intranet. In their private lives, people expect to hop on the web to find not only things to buy, but resources for health, financial, hobby and community information, and they hope to find this information easily. If this information is not presented in ways that make it easy to locate and read, users will seek elsewhere.

  • Optimising search by showing results in context (PDF)
    We developed and evaluated seven interfaces for integrating semantic category information with web search results. List interfaces were based on the familiar ranked-listing of search results, sometimes augmented with a category name for each result. Category interfaces also showed page titles and/or category names, but re-organised the search results so that items in the same category were grouped together visually. Our user studies show that all category interfaces were more effective than list interfaces even when lists were augmented with category names for each result. The best category performance was obtained when both category names and individual page titles were presented. Either alone is better than a list presentation, but both together provide the most effective means for allowing users to quickly examining search results. These results provide a better understanding of the perceptual and cognitive factors underlying the advantage of category groupings and provide some practical guidance to web search interface designers.

  • Recommending pages for special searches
    Search engines use statistical and lexical analysis to match query terms to indexed text, but often, human judgment is more effective. Many search queries are for names, items or even ID numbers. For the most frequent questions on a site, it makes sense to manually identify the best page or pages, and integrate these into the search results. You may want to do this for the top 25 or 100 questions, depending on the traffic on the site. Instead just of relying on the search engine's ability to match terms, you can add human understanding to make the results more useful for the common cases, making best use of both approaches.

  • Search
    The search software you use will often dictate the user interface for searching. If you update your content frequently, be sure that your search engine's indexing is done at least daily. Also be sure that your readers understand exactly what content is being searched: the entire website or just a subsection?

  • Search analytics: a guide to analyzing and optimizing website search engines
    "Do you know your website’s top 20 or 100 keywords? They are more important than you probably think. It is not often in business that customers can directly tell us what they want. There is usually some degree of guesswork and blind faith. But every time site visitors enter a keyword into the search box they are doing just that. In specific, written language, customers reveal their desires, intents and culture. This applies equally to customers searching an Internet retail site, to information seekers searching an external corporate site and to employees searching an intranet."
    Note: must be purchased
    (Hurol Inan)

  • Search engine 'best bets'
    "Much can be done to improve the quality of search results. No amount of tweaking of metadata or search configuration will, however, ensure that the most relevant results always appear at the beginning of the list. This is where search engine 'best bets' come in. These are a hand-created list of key resources for common queries, and they can dramatically improve the search experience, particularly on information-rich sites such as intranets."
    (James Robertson - Step Two Designs)

  • Search engine optimisation a must
    There are hundreds of thousands of websites that don’t get much traffic. Some of these sites house hundreds of articles, reviews, tutorials, tools, products, forums to mention a few things, yet still they do not receive large amounts of traffic. The problem is these sites aren't optimized for the search engines.

  • Search engine optimisation and non-HTML sites
    "If you build it, they will come" might be the line from Field of Dreams but the same theory doesn’t apply to websites. What’s the good of building a great-looking website that no one knows about, or can find? Unfortunately, that is the reality of building websites entirely in Flash.

  • Search engine optimisation: designing a search-friendly site (PDF)
    This article is the third in a series on search engine optimisation, a business marketing strategy that manipulates Internet search engines.

  • Search engine optimisation: keywords that work (PDF)
    This article is the first of several on search engine optimisation, a business marketing strategy that manipulates Internet search engines.

  • Search engine optimisation: making the most of META tags (PDF)
    This article is the second of several on search engine optimization, a business marketing strategy that manipulates Internet search engines.

  • Search engine optimization basics, part 1: improve your standing in search engines
    "Making your Web site attractive to search engines is a key factor for your success as a Web site developer. Get the basic information you need to organically optimize your Web site in this four-part series. In Part 1, you'll receive a foundation in search engine optimization so you can organically optimize your Web site and create Web pages that are usable, accessible, and friendly to search engines."
    (L Jennette Banks - IBM)

  • Search engine optimization basics, part 2: SEO keyword and infrastructure strategies
    "Making your Web site attractive to search engines is a key factor for your success as a Web site developer. Get the basic information you need to organically optimize your Web site in this four-part series. In Part 1, you learned the background of why white hat SEO is good for your site. In Part 2, you'll start optimizing. You'll create a strategy for choosing and optimizing your keywords from the top-left-down and learn more about other factors that can influence your success in search engines."
    (L Jennette Banks - IBM)

  • Search engine optimization basics, part 3: get your web pages into search indexes:
    "Making your Web site attractive to search engines is a key factor for your success as a Web site developer. Get the basic information you need to organically optimize your Web site in this four-part series. In Part 3 of the series, you'll learn how to get the pages of your Web site into the search indexes."
    (Mike Moran, Bill Hunt - IBM)

  • Search engine optimization basics, part 4: improve search marketing for large sites
    "Making your Web site obvious to search engines is a key factor for your success as a Web site developer. Get the basic information you need to organically optimize your Web site in this four-part series. In this final part of the series, learn specialized techniques for large Web sites or sites with many dynamic pages."
    (Mike Moran, Bill Hunt - IBM)

  • Search engine optimization: beyond search keywords
    "Sometimes, those involved in search engine optimization lose sight of certain absolutely critical issues. The objective should not be to optimize for any particular search engine. It is to optimize for people who search. This is a subtle but essential distinction."
    (Gerry McGovern - New Thinking)

  • Search engine users
    "Internet users are extremely positive about search engines and the experiences they have when searching the internet. But these same satisfied internet users are generally unsophisticated about why and how they use search engines. They are also strikingly unaware of how search engines operate and how they present their results."
    (Deborah Fallows)

  • Searching versus finding: why systems need knowledge to find what you really want (PDF)
    Nearly everyone is familiar with the experience of searching with a web search engine and with using a search interface to search a particular website once you get there. After you have a list of hits, you typically spend a significant amount of time following links, waiting for pages to download, reading through a page to see if it has what you want, deciding that it doesn't, backing up to try another link, deciding to try another way to phrase your request, etc. Eventually you may find what you want, or you may ultimately give up and decide that you can't find it. Why is this so difficult?

  • Search interfaces
    Typically, users know what they’re searching for even before they choose a search engine over the site’s navigation. In this investigation, I’d like to explore how we can provide a user interface to help them search more effectively before they get started. This investigation is about the ordering and structure of the search fields themselves, not the results, which have been the topic of much discussion already.

  • Search is not all there
    Search seems to be the buzz at the moment as the latest and greatest form of interaction. If it is, I think it has a ways to go before it can be hailed as such.

  • Search optimization, not search engine optimization
    "If you want to succeed with search engines in the long term, you should not primarily focus on how the search engine works. Rather, you should focus on how the brain of the searcher works. Because if you understand how people search, you’re halfway there to getting found when they search for your content."
    (Gerry McGovern)

  • Search should work like magic
    "Staff should not have to learn complex search options, or spend time carefully considering the most effective search terms and options. Regardless of what the user is searching on, the right results should be returned."
    (James Robertson - Step Two Designs)

  • Search systems (PDF)
    Chapter 8 from Lou Rosenfeld and Peter Morville's Information Architecture for the World Wide Web, 2nd edition. This chapter uses examples of search systems from sites that allow you to search the entire web, as well as site-specific search engines. Although these webwide tools tend to index a very broad collection of content, it is extremely useful to study them. Of all search systems, none has undergone the testing, usage, and investment that web-wide search tools have, so why not benefit from their research? Many of these tools are available for use on local sites as well.

  • Search tools for websites and intranets
    There's a paradox: the more information your site has, the more useful it is--and the harder to navigate! No matter how well you design your site navigation elements, visitors will need other ways to find what they're looking for. This site provides information, news and advice about website searching technology.

  • Simplify and sort for better searches
    The logic behind a usable search tool is simple. People search because they have a question that needs an answer. The search tool's job is to learn the question and provide a clear, concise answer.

  • Site search can be flattened by usability
    If you're using a search solution on your website (Ask Jeeves, EasyAsk, Google, Inktomi, Mercado, Verity etc) or simply offer a search interface that users can find products, information or documents with, you may be missing the main feature that will make it work (and give you the return on investment you want): search interface and search results usability.

  • The age of findability
    Even inside the small world of user experience design, findability doesn’t get enough attention. Interaction design is sexier. Usability is more obvious. And yet, findability will eventually be recognised as a central and defining challenge in the development of web sites, intranets, knowledge management systems and online communities.

  • The best search idea since google
    Amazon.com's announcement this week of its new "search inside" feature--allowing full-text searches of over 120,000 books in its new digital archive--will probably turn out to be one of those transformative web moments when a tool suddenly appears and six months later you can't imagine life without it. For logical reasons, Amazon seems to have designed "search inside" to help readers find text in books that they haven't bought yet. But there's just as much opportunity to apply "search inside" to books you already own.

  • The big dig: mining nuggets of value (PDF)
    This article provides a guide to tailoring search interfaces to users with a persona-based approach.

  • The enterprise search report
    Published by CMS Watch, the Enterprise Search Report is designed to help enterprises make informed search technology strategies and buying decisions. The 450-page report provides a comprehensive overview of search solution providers and best practices. The bulk of the report entails 10- to 20-page comparative evaluations of 28 enterprise search offerings. Note: report must be purchased.
    (Stephen Arnold)

  • The new frontier of search
    While we are not yet living in the Golden Age of search, recent improvements certainly qualify it as a Silver Age. A closer look at the dominant recent trends in search certainly bears this out.

  • The perfect search engine interface
    Last week, a friend of mine reminisced about how he could not access Google from his home due to some ISP issues. He could reach anywhere else--Yahoo or MSN, for example--but not Google. He likened it to losing your glasses and even went so far as to say that the internet is useless without Google. Rather than using other search engines, he simply felt helpless.

  • The power of defaults
    "Search engine users click the results listings' top entry much more often than can be explained by relevancy ratings. Once again, people tend to stick to the defaults."
    (Jakob Nielsen)

  • The scoop on search engines (PDF)
    How website designers can take advantage of the features of search engines to advertise their sites.

  • The search for search's next generation
    Current search engines--even the constantly surprising Google--seem unable to leap the next big barrier in search: the trillions of bytes of dynamically generated data created by individual Web sites around the world, or what some researchers call the "deep web." You can't look up the status of a Federal Express package without going to the Federal Express site, or the details on an eBay item without checking the eBay site. Dynamically generated data can't be spidered.

  • The search lurch. Have we become lazy Googlers or smarter web researchers?
    "Every day millions of Internet searchers use Google or other high-speed search engines such as MSN Search. Are all these Googlers just doing the "search lurch"? Try a few key words, click a few search results, and maybe they'll find what they're looking for in a few seconds. Or maybe they'll just give up and move on to something else. Four Web experts weigh in."
    (Garth A Buchholz - Prentice Hall PTR)

  • The truth about federated searching
    Federated searching is a hot topic that seems to be gaining traction in libraries everywhere. As with many technologies that are rapidly adopted,there are some misconceptions about what it can do. WebFeat, a provider of federated search technology to more than 900 public, academic, and corporate libraries, including more than half of the top 10 U.S. public libraries, has compiled this list of the five most commonly repeated misconceptions about federated searching.

  • Three ways to improve external search engine usability
    Most diligent webmasters spend time on log analysis, analysing server logs to determine where visitors are coming from, which pages they're viewing, how long they're staying, and other significant demographic and technical information. One of the most important details that logs show is which search engines visitors use to get to the site, and which search terms visitors enter. Checking this information is an extremely useful, fascinating, and almost voyeuristic endeavor that has become a hobby in and of itself.

  • Understanding web searching and navigation patterns
    We describe a model for log data of user search sessions obtained from a trail-based search and navigation documentation system. The model elicits interesting patterns that can be used to better understand Web user search and navigation behaviour. Our study shows that such log data reveals interesting patterns beyond the typical statistical query terms analysis.

  • Unifying browse and search in information hierarchies
    Information retrieval systems offer two main methods to access information: searching by submitting a query and browsing a constructed navigation hierarchy. In most systems, these two methods are accessed and operated by the information seeker in different ways and generate different types of result sets that allow different kinds of operations to be performed upon them. This paper suggests two general principles and a set of techniques implementing them for combining the browsing and searching access methods and interfaces for a system into a unified information navigation access method.

  • Use old words when writing for findability
    "Familiar words spring to mind when users create their search queries. If your writing favors made-up terms over legacy words, users won't find your site."
    (Jakob Nielsen - Alertbox)

  • Users don't learn to search better
    When we watched 30 users trying to search various sites for content they were interested in, we noticed a peculiar phenomenon: the more times the users searched, the less likely they were to find what they wanted. The data is quite clear on this: On a single search, users found their content 55% of the time, whereas users who searched twice found their content only 38% of the time. None of the users in our study who searched more than twice ever found their target content.

  • What are the best practices in web site search? (PDF)
    One of the keys to improving discovery on a site is allowing a mixture of search and navigation. This article suggests 10 key aspects of an integrated approach.

  • What to include in intranet search results
    "Intranet search often fails to meet the needs or expectations of users, with confusing and complex results provided for even the simplest searches. While there is much that can be done to improve the effectiveness of intranet search, a good starting point is to improve the design of search results pages. The first question to ask is: what to include (and what not to include) in search results? This briefing is designed to provide a simple checklist that can be used to assess (and then redesign) intranet search results pages."
    (James Robertson)

  • Who are we designing for? People or robots?
    "We are increasingly being asked to produce sites that rank in the top 10 for their specific industry. Now, it is possible to produce user friendly sites focussing on usability as much as SEO-- but does this mean that the design suffers because of it? Are we beginning to write, design and build sites for Google's Googlebot, or is it simply that we are becoming more aware of the need to optimise for the good of our client's business? "
    (Johnny Ratcliffe)

  • Wondering about advanced search
    Lou Rosenfeld outlines some reasons why users don't use advanced search features on web sites.

Research articles

  • Collaborative information retrieval
    The goal of this study is to obtain a better understanding of social aspects of information retrieval in a variety of workplace settings. Information retrieval has been viewed as an individual activity, and tools to support it can benefit from a more complete understanding of why and how it is carried out. Part of our plan is to develop a conceptual framework to guide research, design, and organisational behavior in the area of Collaborative Information Retrieval (CIR).

  • Designing for information foragers: a behavioral model for information-seeking on the World Wide Web
    This paper explains and elaborates a behavioural model for understanding how people look for information on the web. The first half briefly reviews a wide range key research to provide a broader context for understanding human information seeking behavior and a starting point for further exploration. The second part proposes a model for organising design ideas based on this research.

  • Eye tracking in web search tasks: design implications (PDF)
    Results of a small eye tracking research project carried about by a team from Oracle and Stanford.

  • Fuzzy matching as a retrieval-enabling technique for digital libraries
    This paper advocates an often-neglected search-support technique, approximate or "fuzzy" matching of user search terms. When properly deployed, fuzzy matching can significantly enhance the benefits of other, more common approaches to end-user answer retrieval from online reference collections. We compare crude with more sophisticated approximation techniques to explain how astute fuzzy-match software can convert many different near-miss situations (such as those involving faulty prefixes or suffixes, character misplacement, nonstandard word stems, or unanticipated redescription of concepts) into more adequate results. We also suggest practical ways to overcome fuzzy matching's own major drawbacks (namely, problems with search speed, search imprecision, and misinterpretation of search results). The resulting analysis clarifies how to deploy fuzzy matching for maximum effectiveness. We conclude that appropriate fuzzy matching enables more frequent, more flexible search success than do ordinary retrieval-improvement techniques used without it.

  • Information seeking research needs extension towards tasks and technology
    This paper discusses the research into information seeking and its directions at a general level. We approach this topic by analysis and argumentation based on past research in the domain. We begin by presenting a general model of information seeking and retrieval which is used to derive nine broad dimensions that are needed to analyze information seeking and retrieval. Past research is then contrasted with the dimensions and shown not to cover the dimensions sufficiently. Based on an analysis of the goals of information seeking research, and a view on human task performance augmentation, it is then shown that information seeking is intimately associated with, and dependent on, other aspects of work; tasks and technology included. This leads to a discussion on design and evaluation frameworks for information seeking and retrieval, based on which two action lines are proposed: information retrieval research needs extension toward more context and information seeking research needs extension towards tasks and technology.

  • Linking and searching
    A series of observations and guidelines derived from a report summarising research on how users find information on web sites.

  • People search once, maybe twice
    When looking for content, users often end up using the search engine. In a recent study, we observed that users only found their target content 34% of the time with Search. (This is compared to 54% of the time with categories.) We wanted to know why.

  • ScentTrails: integrating browsing and searching on the web (PDF)
    The two predominant paradigms for finding information on the web are browsing and keyword searching. Neither is adequate for complex information goals that lend themselves partially to browsing and partially to searching. To integrate browsing and searching smoothly into a single interface, we introduce a novel approach called ScentTrails.

  • Search engine personalisation: an exploratory study
    Web search engines are beginning to offer personalisation capabilities to users. Personalisation is the ability of the website to match retrieved information content to a user's profile. This content can be set explicitly by the user or derived implicitly by the website using such user profile information as zip code, birth date, etc. In this paper we report findings from a study qualitatively and quantitatively assessing the current state of personalization on 60 search engine websites and the personalisation features available.Our findings show that despite the high level of interest in Web personalisation, most search engine Web sites currently offer no or limited personalisation features.

  • Searching the workplace web
    The social impact from the World Wide Web cannot be underestimated, but technologies used to build the web are also revolutionising the sharing of business and government information within intranets. In many ways the lessons learned from the Internet carry over directly to intranets, but others do not apply. In particular, the social forces that guide the development of intranets are quite different, and the determination of a "good answer" for intranet search is quite different than on the Internet. In this paper we study the problem of intranet search. Our approach focuses on the use of rank aggregation, and allows us to examine the effects of different heuristics on ranking of search results.

  • Searching vs linking on the web: a summary of the research (PDF)
    This 17-page report summarises the available research on how users search for information within web sites. It addresses users' behaviours and how to improve users' ability to find information through search or the use of links.

  • The design of browsing and berrypicking techniques for the online search interface
    First, a new model of searching in online and other information systems, called "berrypicking," is discussed.  This model, it is argued, is much closer to the real behavior of information searchers than the traditional model of information retrieval is, and, consequently, will guide our thinking better in the design of effective interfaces.  Second, the research literature of manual information seeking behavior is drawn on for suggestions of capabilities that users might like to have in online systems.  Third, based on the new model and the research on information seeking, suggestions are made for how new search capabilities could be incorporated into the design of search interfaces.  Particular attention is given to the nature and types of browsing that can be facilitated.

  • Understanding user goals in web search (PDF)
    Previous work on understanding user web search behaviour has focused on how people search and what they are searching for, but not why they are searching. In this paper, we describe a framework for understanding the underlying goals of user searches, and our experience in using the framework to manually classify queries from a web search engine. Our analysis suggests that so-called 'navigational'searches are less prevalent than generally believed, while a previously unexplored 'resourceseeking' goal may account for a large fraction of web searches. We also illustrate how this knowledge of user search goals might be used to improve future web search engines.

  • Understanding taxonomies and search for corporate applications
    As companies grapple with ever-expanding amounts of (especially unstructured and semi-structured) content and the resulting difficulty of even finding information they know they have somewhere, they become more willing to consider the effort of organizing information so that it can be found, and found quickly. This means that IT strategists and many business managers now need to understand what taxonomies are, what their value to search is, how they get developed, what is involved in their design and use, what technology can do vs. what humans still have to do, and what they need to consider before they get started.
    (Lynda Moulton)

  • Unifying browse and search in information hierarchies
    Information retrieval systems offer two main methods to access information: searching by submitting a query and browsing a constructed navigation hierarchy. In most systems, these two methods are accessed and operated by the information seeker in different ways and generate different types of result sets that allow different kinds of operations to be performed upon them. This paper suggests two general principles and a set of techniques implementing them for combining the browsing and searching access methods and interfaces for a system into a unified information navigation access method.

  • Using meaningful and stable categories to support exploratory web search: two formative studies
    "Categorizing web search results into comprehensible visual displays using meaningful and stable classifications can support user exploration, understanding, and discovery. We report on two formative studies in the domain of U.S. government web search that investigated how searchers use categorized overviews of search results for complex, exploratory search tasks. The first study compared two overview conditions vs. a control (N=18). The overviews were based on the federal government organizational hierarchy. With the overview conditions, participants noticed missing results more often than participants in the control. They also found pages of interest deeper within the results. The overview conditions received significantly higher subjective ratings. The second study compared an overview based on automated clustering vs. the government hierarchy overview (N=12), and the results suggest that domain knowledge and task influenced the preferred overview. The studies lend support to the use of compact overviews based on meaningful and stable categories tightly coupled with ranked result lists."
    (Bill Kules, Ben Shneiderman - University of Maryland)

  • Web search: how the web has changed information retrieval
    Topical metadata have been used to indicate the subject of web pages. They have been simultaneously hailed as building blocks of the semantic web and derogated as spam. At this time major web browsers avoid harvesting topical metadata. This paper suggests that the significance of the topical metadata controversy depends on the technological appropriateness of adding them to web pages. This paper surveys web technology with an eye on assessing the appropriateness of web pages as hosts for topical metadata. The survey reveals web pages to be both transient and volatile: poor hosts of topical metadata. The closed web is considered to be a more supportive environment for the use of topical metadata. The closed web is built on communities of trust where the structure and meaning of web pages can be anticipated. The vast majority of web pages, however, exist in the open web, an environment that challenges the application of legacy information retrieval concepts and methods.

  • When search engines become answer engines
    The website is becoming a less prominent locus of experience as people use search engines to bring up answers to their current questions. How can sites cope with masses of freeloaders?

Case studies

  • A Day in the Life of BBCi Search
    Since BBCi launched in November 2001, its improved search offering has been collecting data on the way that BBC website users search both the BBC's website, and through its homepage Websearch, the whole wide web. This article shows how the search team analyse their search logs in order to understand user search behaviour.

  • Adventures in low fidelity: designing search for Egreetings
    This article describes the experience I had while working on a project for Egreetings. I want to share my story because it illustrates the value of employing user testing techniques during IA design and applying ideas about facets and controlled vocabularies to creating a search interface.

  • The best search idea since google
    Amazon.com's announcement this week of its new "search inside" feature--allowing full-text searches of over 120,000 books in its new digital archive--will probably turn out to be one of those transformative Web moments when a tool suddenly appears and six months later you can't imagine life without it. For logical reasons, Amazon seems to have designed "search inside" to help readers find text in books that they haven't bought yet. But there's just as much opportunity to apply "search inside" to books you already own.

Bibliographies

  • Graphical interfaces to support information search: an annotated bibliography
    This bibliography is organized to provide a structured introduction to graphical interfaces to information systems. Overview articles and "classic" systems provide background on past work in this field. Systems with Demo Potential can be accessed via the Internet for additional study. Other systems of interest are included, with the more developed or unique systems listed first, and divided between 2D and 3D visualisations. Articles about user-testing or evaluating graphical interfaces are included, as are references to other existing bibliographies on this topic. Where possible, annotations include links to articles in addition to citations, the authors' abstracts and additional comments. Identifying screenshots of systems are included when available.

Conference and workshop presentations

  • Search Engine Meeting 2004
    The Search Engines Meetings bring together commercial search engine developers, academics and corporate professionals to learn from each other. Presentations from the 2004 meeting are available from this site.

Resource collections

  • Searchtools.com
    This site provides information, news and advice about web site searching technology. It is maintained by Search Tools Consulting as a service to the web community.