Search User Interfaces: Marti Hearst

Marti Hearst - pre-eminant in the fields of text mining and user interfaces - yesterday published her book on Search User Interfaces. I intend to write up a review of the content later, but for now heres a summary.

The book, which is available freely online,  describes itself thus:

This book presents the state of the art of search interface design, based on both academic research and deployment in commercial systems.

and covers topics including the design and evaluation of interfaces, and visualization of search results.

Coincidently, the launch of the book is timely with the recent launch of Bing. A big part of the strategy behind Bing has been to provide a better user experience around search, offering affordances to help the user succeed in their task right there in the interface. Marti's book, which was completed prior to Bing's launch, doesn't cover this new search engine, but I'm sure the second edition will!

Marti is blogging about the book at SearchUpTicious (!)