“In a world where people have so little attention to give, we must help people find what they want when they want it—when they are interested. We must shift from push to pull so people can pull things when we want it.” (Mike Moran – Biznology) – courtesy of keithinstone

“Any organization that has a searchable web site or intranet is sitting on top of hugely valuable and usually under-exploited data: logs that capture what users searching for, how often each query was searched, and how many results each query retrieved. Search queries are gold: they are real data that show us exactly what users are searching for in their own words. This book shows you how to use search analytics to carry on a conversation with your customers: listen to and understand their needs, and improve your content, navigation and search performance to meet those needs.” (Rosenfeld Media)

“The words people type into a search box are not always the words they like to read when they click on the search result.” (Gerry McGovern)

“Peter Morville, co-author of Information Architecture for the World Wide Web with Lou Rosenfeld and author of Ambient Findability, presented a very informative day-long lecture on the subject of information architecture (IA). He discussed many basic concepts as well as best practices, so his presentation would appeal to both beginner and intermediate IAs.” (Russell Wilson – UXmatters)

“This paper considers information safety and accuracy in the digital age using Google as an entry point. In doing so, it explores the role media play in shaping the relationship of information, privacy, and trust between Google and the public. This inquiry is undertaken using framing theory to guide a content analysis of the way Google is presented in New York Times articles from a two–year period ending in November, 2005. Analysis of the extensive coverage of Google’s share price and earnings reports leads to the conclusion that trust in Google is fostered in part simply by reports of its fiscal success. To the extent that this is true, meaningful public debate about information policies is inhibited.” (Lee Shaker- First Monday 11.4)

The Search for Search – “The purpose of the SDForum Silicon Valley Search SIG is to offer a communication and collaboration platform to the Search ecosystem: search engines, marketers/advertisers, users and developers. Through a series of monthly events, the SIG will cover a large diversity of topics: from the latest developments in search to the needs of brands and advertisers, through the issues and key learnings of starting, funding, building, and exiting a search company.” (About the Search SIG)

Also, including a conversation with Peter Morville at SXSW 2006 Studio SX – “At the crossroads of ubiquitous computing and the Internet, the user experience is out of control, and findability is the real story. Access changes the game. We can select our sources and choose our news. We can find who and what we need, when and where we want. As society shifts from push to pull, findability shapes who we trust, how we learn, and where we go. In this thought-provoking talk, best-selling author Peter Morville explores the future present in mobile and embedded devices, GPS and RFID technologies, search algorithms, findable objects, evolutionary psychology, and the long tail of the sociosemantic web.” (SXSW 2006 Interactive)

“Findability is the quality of being locatable or navigable, and ‘ambient’ means surrounding, encircling, and enveloping.” (Bruce Stewart – O’Reilly ETech)

The 2005 John Wiley & Sons Best JASIST Paper Award Winner – “This paper reports on a study exploring the environmental factors that influence users’ information seeking at home.” (Soo Young Rieh)

“Design on the web has changed a lot since the mid 1990’s. Not only has the language used to create pages expanded, but so has the capability of browsers, and the availability of bandwidth. Consequently pages have gradually carried more and more content, and designers, information architects, and HTML developers have faced the challenge of presenting increasingly sophisticated information and marketing messages onto the computer monitors in homes and offices around the world.” (Mark Belam – currybetdotnet)

“This article explores one question: what does Internet searching have to do with personal development? Personal development means that individuals improve their own abilities, skills, knowledge or other qualities by working on them. The paper reports on a qualitative case study, in which a single participant was interviewed and her Web searches observed. Information search strategies seemed to form a spectrum of developmental sophistication. Four major types of relationship were found: a) the Internet in the context of development; b) development in the context of the Internet; c) development affecting Internet use; and, d) Internet use affecting development. There were some informational phenomena which exhibited regression, the converse of development.” (Jarkko Kari – First Monday 11.1)

Read the Comments – “Read ‘Ambient Findability’ if: you are interested in expanding your business or nonprofit through its presence on the Internet; you are a librarian and want to grow into the nontraditional environment of the Web; you are a Web designer and want to optimize the findability of your sites on the Internet; you are a user and want to enhance your searching experience. Read this book if you are a teacher, a student, a writer, a parent… in short, if you use a computer or a handheld or a GPS or a smartphone or any type of technology that connects you to the world, then you should read this book. Peter Morville’s ‘Ambient Findability’ will amaze and delight you. It will give you new insight into how ubiquitous computing is affecting how we find and use information and how we, as users, can and will shape the future of how data is stored and retrieved.” (Slashdot.org)

“The Web is continuing to grow rapidly and search engine technologies are evolving fast. Despite these developments, some problems still remain, mainly, difficulties in finding relevant, dependable information. This problem is exacerbated in the case of the academic community, which requires reliable scientific materials in various specialized research areas. We propose that a solution for the academic community might be a meta–search engine which would allow search queries to be sent to several specialty search engines that are most relevant for the information needs of the academic community. The basic premise is that since the material indexed in the repositories of specialty search engines is usually controlled, it is more reliable and of better quality.” (Yaffa Aharoni et al. – First Monday 10.12)

“The term ambient findability describes a world at the crossroads of ubiquitous computing and the internet, in which we can find anyone or anything from anywhere at any time. It’s not necessarily a goal, and we’ll never achieve perfect findability, but we’re surely headed in the right direction. A clear sign of progress is the emergence of ubiquitous findable objects. GPS, RFID, UWB, and cellular triangulation enable us, for the first time in history, to tag and track products, possessions, pets, and people as they wander through space and time.” – (Peter Morville – O’Reilly Network)

“It’s a rollercoaster of concepts. – (…) I’m not sure who coined the term ‘findability’, but I am sure it wasn’t me.” – (Peter Merholz – Designing for the Sandbox)

Wilson, T.D. (2005). Review of: Battelle, J. The search: How Google and its rivals rewrote the rules of business and transformed our culture. Boston, MA, London: Nicholas Brearley Publishing, 2005. Information Research, 11 (1) – “Perfect search – every single possible bit of information at our fingertips, perfectly contexualised, perfectly personalized – may never be realized. But the journey to find out if it just might be is certainly going to be fun.” – (Information Research 11.1)

“Now that it’s so easy for people to search for anything in a fraction of a second and retrieve content buried in deep links thanks to Google and other high-speed tools such as MSN Search, is this creating a kind of laziness on the part of Web users?” (Garth A. Buchholz)

“You often search because you have poor memory. But, it isn’t so poor that you are a blank slate, tabula rasa. No, instead, you have a clue and you are buying more clues with every search you do. Let’s cut to the core of this.” (John Rhodes – WebWord)

“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 and Mika Käki – First Monday 10.7)

“Users now have precise expectations for the behavior of search. Designs that invoke this mental model but work differently are confusing.” (Jakob Nielsen – Alertbox)