Search User Interfaces

The truly world-wide reach of the Web has brought with it a new realisation 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 range of innovative interface ideas, but only the most broadly acceptable make their way into major web search engines. This book summarizes these developments, presenting the state of the art of search interface design, both in academic research and in deployment in commercial systems. Many books describe the algorithms behind search engines and information retrieval systems, but the unique focus of this book is specifically on the user interface. It will be welcomed by industry professionals who design systems that use search interfaces as well as graduate students and academic researchers who investigate information systems.

1. The design of search user interfaces; 2. The evaluation of search user interfaces; 3. Models of the information seeking process; 4. Query specification; 5. Presentation of search results; 6. Query reformulation; 7. Supporting the search process; 8. Integrating navigation with search; 9. Personalization in search; 10. Information visualization for search interfaces; 11. Information visualization for text analysis; 12. Emerging trends in search interfaces.

Summarizes the state of the art in search interface design, both in academic research and for commercial systems. Search-engine design professionals, graduate students and researchers will find this book of immense value to their work.

Marti A. Hearst is a Professor in the School of Information at the University of California, Berkeley. She received B.A., M.S., and Ph.D. degrees in Computer Science from the University of California, Berkeley and was a Member of the Research Staff at Xerox PARC from 1994 to 1997. A primary focus of Hearst's research is user interfaces for search. She has invented or participated in several well-known search interface projects including Scatter/Gather clustering of search results, TileBars query term visualization, BioText search over the bioscience literature, and the Flamenco project that investigated and promoted the use of faceted metadata for collection navigation. She has published extensively on this and other topics. Hearst has advised more than fifty masters-level interface design projects, from problem formation and needs assessment through three rounds of evaluation. She has also taught Information Organization and Retrieval and a course called Search Engines: Technology, Society, and Business, which includes a set of popular video lectures.