“Historically I had been taught and understood search and browse as distinct elements – which they are visually and from a UI elements standpoint – but from a behavioral perspective, they really are not, rather, they are part of a continuum. A spectrum of discovery behaviors if you will.” (Livia Labate)

“Information retrieval did not begin with the Web. In response to various challenges of providing information access, the field of information retrieval evolved to give principled approaches to searching various forms of content. The field began with scientific publications and library records, but soon spread to other forms of content, particularly those of information professionals, such as journalists, lawyers, and doctors. Much of the scientific research on information retrieval has occurred in these contexts, and much of the continued practice of information retrieval deals with providing access to unstructured information in various corporate and governmental domains, and this work forms much of the foundation of our book.” (Christopher D. Manning, Prabhakar Raghavan, and Hinrich Schütze 2008)

“Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is not a legitimate form of marketing. It should not be undertaken by people with brains or souls. If someone charges you for SEO, you have been conned.” (Derek Powazek) – courtesy of markbernstein

“The technology of information retrieval systems continues to evolve, and in particular, the technology of search has continued to evolve. A new stage in the evolution of search has arrived with the advent of entity-based searching. This paper provides a brief review of some of the earlier stages of search evolution in the context of the evolutionary pressures of the concurrent improvement of both precision and recall.” (John D. Holt and David J. Miller – ASIS&T Bulletin October/November 2009)

“Faceted search user interfaces are fairly new, and potential design pitfalls abound. Fortunately, there are a few relatively simple and straightforward design best practices that should help designers to minimize cognitive friction and create search user interfaces that are easy to understand and use.” (Greg Nudelman – UXmatters)

“(…) for most users of consumer-facing ecommerce applications, the difference between a sort and a filter presents a mystery they understand dimly, if at all. The distinction between sorting and filtering blurs, because of a phenomenon I’ve called filtering by sorting, which leads to all sorts of interesting search user interface implications.” (Greg Nudelman – UXmatters)

“(…) the search engine taste test. Type in a search query above, hit search then vote for the column which you believe best matches your query. The columns are randomised with every query. The goal of this site is simple, we want to see what happens when you remove the branding from search engines. How differently will you perceive the results? – I work for Microsoft. This site is not affiliated with my employer, it is not a Microsoft initiative, it’s simply me having fun in my spare time.” (Michael Kordahi) – courtesy of rnagtegaal

“The biased coverage of Google and Live Search raises concern because of their international nature. The coverage bias by the European search engines only seems to have local or regional significance.” (Ari Pirkola – Information Research 14.2)

“Faceted search lets users refine or navigate a collection of information by using a number of discrete attributes – the so-called facets. A facet represents a specific perspective on content that is typically clearly bounded and mutually exclusive. The values within a facet can be a flat list that allows only one choice (e.g. a list of possible shoe sizes) or a hierarchical list that allow you to drill-down through multiple levels (e.g. product types, Computers > Laptops). The combination of all facets and values are often called a faceted taxonomy. These faceted values can be added directly to content as metadata or extracted automatically using text mining software.” – (Stephanie Lemieux – User Interface Engineering)

“The premise is that people don’t want to search. Instead, people want to get their tasks done and get straight to their answers. So how to we do this? We move from a web of pages to a web of objects. People, places, businesses, restaurants are all objects that have attributes such as noisy or expensive (in the case of restaurants.) Intents of searchers are satisfied by presenting objects and attributes. It’s not exactly the semantic web but about finding implicit relations through web usage.” – (Ricardo Baeza-Yates – The Next Web)

“People use Twine to keep track of their interests. Twine is a new way for you to collect online content – videos, photos, articles, Web pages, products – and bring it all together by topic, so you can have it in one place and share it with anyone you want.” – (About Twine)

“Page layout forms the foundation in presenting search results. Your layout decisions for search results pages will have tremendous impact on the user experience for your entire site. Choosing the right width for search results is important, and the optimal width for search results may be a great deal narrower than some people using big monitors would believe.” – (Greg Nudelman – UXmatters)

“Now a new breed of technologies is taking shape that will extend the reach of search engines into the Web’s hidden corners. When that happens, it will do more than just improve the quality of search results — it may ultimately reshape the way many companies do business online.” – (Alex Wright – NYTimes) registration required

“The important thing to remember here is that search should be a key consideration at every stage of the process, whether it is selecting a provider, setting requirements, producing comps, coding or site deployment.” (Rob Garner – MediaPost) – courtesy of janjursa

“Kuhlthau’s model of the Information Search Process was developed in the 1980s and refined in the 1990s. Since its conceptualization and development, the model has been used as a framework and diagnostic tool for understanding the information search experience of people in a variety of library and information settings. These information environments and services have not remained static, particularly with rapid advances in and impacts of information technology. Therefore, questions arise regarding the current usefulness of the model in light of the developments in the information environment to date. This paper seeks to explore whether the model still is a useful, insightful explanation of information seeking behaviour. This question is examined through a literature review of recent work applying the model and presents findings from a research study that explored the model within a school context.” (Carol C. Kuhlthau et al. – ISIC08 via Information Research 13.4)