Search User Interfaces

by Admin


05 Mar
 None    Search Engines


by Charlotte Bourne


by Charlotte Bourne
http://www.enquiro.com

If you’re interested in the academic side of search, chances are you’ve come across the work of Marti Hearst, a professor at Berkeley’s School of Information. Her work covers everything from search engines, search interfaces, social technology, information visualization and web usability. Her book, Search User Interfaces, came out late last year and is a great resource for anyone interested in the information seeking process and how users interact with search and search results. Better yet, the text of the entire book is available free online.
If you are interested in usability, the chapters on the design, presentation, and evaluation of search interfaces will be of interest. For SEO, Heart has some relevant chapters on personalization in search and emerging trends such as multimedia, social and mobile search. Interestingly, she cites research that shows that more content does not necessarily equate to better search results for complex queries – which has ramifications for mobile search. The section on multimedia search highlights some of the difficulties in using text-based queries to capture non-text results, plus the challenges of using non-text queries (like images, such as Google’s Goggles) to retrieve information.

One chapter to of note for both usability and SEO experts is her chapter on models of the information seeking process. Hearst gives a great overview of the most common models of searching, including the standard information seeking process, cognitive and dynamic models, and models for search in stages, search as a strategic process, and sensemaking.

If you are interested in Hearst’s work, her university course called Search Engines: Technology, Society and Business is a available as a podcast and includes guest lecturers such as Hal Varian and Daniel Russell from Google, Marc Najork from Microsoft Research, and Jason Schultz from the EFF.


© 2009 Enquiro Search Solutions.


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