A few years ago I was caught in a heavy rainstorm in Trafalguar Square, London and went into the National Gallery for shelter. In one of the galleries a curator was explaining the signficance about some of the elements of a painting by Caravaggio, and after a very short time I was seeing the picture in a totally different light. I had the same reaction after reading Search Patterns, a new book by Peter Morville and Jeffery Callender, which takes the reader on a journey through the ways in which search applications enable users to post a query and then evaluate the results. That all seems so simple, and after at least three decades of using search applications I wondered what more there was to learn. 

The chapters of the book are entitled Pattern Recognition, The Anatomy of Search, Behaviour, Design Patterns, Engines of Discovery and Tangible Futures. A design pattern is a generic approach to solving a problem, and a good way to understand what they are and how they work is to look at the Yahoo! Design Pattern Library. An example cited by the authors is the process of autocomplete in query optimisation. A dozen examples are presented as quite clear screen shots, and the merits of each are succinctly highlighted. It is not the purpose of this book to say that there is a single solution, but to present a range of good solutions from which designers can take an individual pattern and customise it for a specific need. Something as basic as how to present search results in a list on a page produces a dozen ideas.

One page of the book in particular stands out, and that is page 20 in which the authors set out their basic principles. It should be turned into a large poster and pinned to the wall in every search development office. There are 20 of them, and one of my favourites is that increments are not enough, as even Google must innovate or die.

The presentation of the book is excellent, and O'Reilly set the standards in books for the web community. There is a well-constructed index. My only criticism is that the key words are highlighted in orange, and the colour contrast on a high-quality paper stock is not very good. It may only be 180 pages in length but this is a book that will make you think, go on to the web to try to assess some of the pattern suggestions, and then call a meeting of your design group to work on some immediate enhancements to your website or intranet. The lessons and patterns are common to both. Search engine vendors should buy the book in bulk. There really is a lot to learn!

Earlier this year Marti Hearst published her book on Search User Interfaces. Search Patterns is the perfect complement, and together they are a very good reason for coming to the Enterprise Search Summit this year in New York where Marti and Peter are both keynote speakers.

Martin White