A Book Review by Paul T. Jackson

A Book Review by Paul T. Jackson, Trescott Research, Enumclaw, WA 98022
Moville, Peter and Callender, Jeffery, Search Patterns, Sabastopol, CA: O’Reilly, 2010. 180p. with index.

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Peter Morville’s earlier book Ambient Findability explored most of the problems we encounter in searching for information and gave illustrations of some of the things scientists and information or knowledge managers were working on to help. [see my review here: http://units.sla.org/chapter/cpnw/interface/2006/spring/news.html ] It was an exciting book to read back in 2005.

With that background, I felt I just had to see this new Morville book, Search Patterns. It is really an overview of the field of Internet search engines, written with designers of search engine sites in mind who design the pages and the programs that help information specialists and searchers find things or information, particularly those things that would appear on the Internet that could be found if the right way or search mechanism were found that indeed found what we needed. It would probably make a good course outline for beginner search designers and faculty teaching search strategies and search literacy.