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Top 10 Enterprise Search Must Reads

Looking to hone up your enterprise search skills, but having a hard time figuring out where to turn? Well, maybe we can help. With summer just around the corner, we know many of you will be packing up and heading to the beach for some well deserved rest and relaxation. If you’re like us, this also means you’ll be stocking up with a few good books to kick back and relax with (just keep in mind that the glare on an iPad screen is a reall killer). Why not take advantage of this time to delve into some of the wonderful enterprise search books out there? While there aren’t a lot of general enterprise search books in print, the one’s that do exist are generally quite good. We’ve been through just about all of them, so we thought we’d put together a list of our favourites, for colleagues and clients alike. A few of these books aren’t specificaly enterprise search related, but we feel are still quite relevant to the field. Think we’re missing a few? Let us know of others you think should be in the top 10. A bit of forewarning – we’ll be tough to sway!

  1. Search Patterns, by Peter Morville and Jeffrey Callender

  2. Making Search Work, by Martin White

  3. Beyond Search: What to Do When Your Enterprise Search System Doesn’t Work, by Stephen E. Arnold

  4. Designing Search: UX Strategies for eCommerce Success, by Greg Nudelman

  5. Search User Interfaces, by Marti A. Hearst

  6. Ambient Findability, by Peter Morville

  7. Information Architecture for the World Wide Web: Designing Large-Scale Web Sites, by Peter Morville and Louis Rosenfeld

  8. Enterprise Search in Action, by Marc Teutelink (early access edition)

  9. Endeca User Interface Design Pattern Library, by Endeca (okay, not really a book but Endeca has done an excellent job with this – Instapaper it, and pretend it’s a book)

  10. Search Analytics for Your Site, by Louis Rosenfeld (well okay, to be fair we haven’t read this one yet as it hasn’t been released. It will be soon however, and since we’re quite enamored with search analytics we definitely can’t wait!)

What a search summit!  Always interesting to meet people with whom you can exchange tips, tricks, and techniques.  A lot of familiar faces, a lot of familiar products, but also a few new comers trying to shake up the industry. (more…)

You want your search users to find what they’re looking for on their first try, but just can’t seem to make it happen. You’ve followed your search engines official documentation to the letter, you’ve read up on all of the best practices you could find, you’ve tried several different search configurations … yet, you just can’t seem to find the “perfect” relevancy formula for your enterprise search implementation. You’re now at the point where you’re about to give up and tell your team to start looking into a different search engine altogether. Wait! Is your search engine really the problem? (more…)

So you’ve launched your new enterprise search implementation for your customers, after an astronomical amount of effort, painfully tight deadlines, and tearing through a large pile of cash. You’re quite proud of your new search, as you should be. One small question is starting to bother you however – now what? (more…)