F.A.S.T.E.R. – The Music Search Engine – SEL 5229 – Selected Sound / The Audio Factory [Import]
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Search User Interfaces
This book focuses on the human users of search engines and the tool they use to interact with them: the search user interface. The truly worldwide reach of the Web has brought with it a new realization among computer scientists and laypeople of the enormous importance of usability and user interface design. In the last ten years, much has become understood about what works in search interfaces from a usability perspective, and what does not. Researchers and practitioners have developed a wide ra
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Review by G. Linden for Search User Interfaces
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This book is a survey of recent work in search, but with an unusual focus on the importance of interface design on searcher’s perceptions of the quality and usefulness of search results.
It is an excellent supplement to core search texts such as Introduction to Information Retrieval (Manning et al., 2008) which focus on the backend technology behind search. Search User Interfaces focuses more on the how we search, what we expect to see when we search, different interfaces that have been tried in the past, and which of those people found useful.
More specifically, the author starts by looking at why Google and other search engines have such a spartan design, explaining that searchers find it most helpful when distractions are minimized and it is quick and easy to iterate on searches. She goes on to lay a foundation by looking at the many models for how people search, including an exploration of the information foraging model where searchers partially satisfy some goals while rapidly developing new goals as they are exposed to new information. She offers hints on techniques that have worked well (e.g. immediately showing search results, keywords-in-context in the snippets, diversity of results on ambiguous queries, biasing results based on query term order and proximity, the importance of seemingly minor design tweaks, just to name a few). She dismisses more complicated interfaces such as boolean queries, thumbnails of result pages, clustering, pseudo-relevance feedback, explicit personalization, and visualizations of query refinements and search results, saying that they showed poor results in the past. She holds out hope for faceted search, universal search, and implicit personalization.
I enjoyed the way this book usefully points at techniques which have shown promise while dismissing others as consistently confusing to users. It is a guide to what works and what does not in search, warning of paths that likely lead into the weeds and pointing to better opportunities.
Review by A. Rappoport for Search User Interfaces
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Professor Marti Hearst has written the comprehensive review of all current research on search engine user interfaces. But this book is more than just a survey of the literature: it explains all aspects of successful search use interface design (and usability and user experience). Many of us have had ideas that seem nice but simply do not work in practice. Reading this book will save everyone involved with search engine design a huge amount of time and trouble.
The writing in this book is extremely clear and direct: it’s an ideal textbook for anyone interested in search engines in general as well as interface issues. I wish it had been around when I was first (painfully) learning many of these lessons. Highly recommended.