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.


In the first section, the authors review what we are engaged in currently when we search. We are shown some of the pages we might see (of course those illustrations are so small it is hard to get an idea of what is going on within the web page without a magnifying glass.) These illustrations cover the named design processes called Incremental construction, Progressive disclosure, Immediate response, Alternate views, Predictability, Recognition over recall, Minimal disruption, Direct manipulation and Context of use. We are then presented with the “design patterns” or constructions of the search engines such as Auto-complete, Best First, Federated Search, Faceted Navigation, Advanced search, Personalization, Pagination, Structured Results, Actionable result, and Unified discovery. These search processes/constructs and discussion will help information professionals understand why there is a need to understand exactly what these various engines can and can’t do as they do searching for clients. The authors insist on using the term “faceted navigation” and boldly say, “After all interaction with facets are (sic) the closest we come to the reference interview and what Google cofounder Sergey Brin calls the ultimate personalized search engine; the librarian.” “Faceted Navigation” brings to my mind from the illustrations nothing more than what most people understand as a Portal. It also confuses me because of my understanding of “faceted classification” used early with punched cards and hard copy files being shelved in doctor’s offices, or Sear’s customer orders being filed/shelved by phone number digits.

Again for the designers there are suggestions which need to be kept in mind while they do what they do; find ways for us to search which result in good hits. These are the “Engines of Discovery” including Category, Topic, Format, Audience Platform, and Mode. Drill down and perhaps one will find a “record.”

While Search Patterns is a review of things that go into search, and where we are now with regard to web page search pages, later in the book, without warning, the reader is treated to a couple of scenarios suggesting where we might be in the future. These Sci-Fi scenarios suggest where search processes might take us; mainly to immediate sales, using our mobile computer/phone for food, or tickets, or clothing, and finding locations, with little if any thought to our struggle with answers to the business or concept questions. In other words a scenario where we use digital information for what we do now with voice calls, directory lookups, asking someone on the street just to get around. Hmm…maybe we’ll not be able to get lost and no longer serendipitously find something unusual or interesting, as my wife and I did often while in Europe walking around cities being lost.

The authors have pieced together some philosophy citing the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis (calling it only the “Whorf hypothesis”) of linguistic relativity which basically observes; how we ask the question determines what answers we find. They also talk about “myth” as being our stories that create the future. From that the authors then jump to the conclusion; future is built by what we search and find. Thus; search results influence our behavior and creates our future.

While this is a very good overview of search, my disappointment is there is little discussion of the research learning how people actually do their searching; what was found out. When I read the title, my thought was this is a book about how people search. Well it isn’t. It’s about how search engines presents results from our queries. The only direct information I found relating to usage was an undocumented statement, “on average, people use and learn only from the top three hits on the first search results page.” If indeed that is true, then surely all of our college students who write papers will be using the same information with nothing new being discovered; thus freezing our future here and now. Certainly knowing more about how people do search, how they construct their inquiry, vocabulary used, search results used, et al, could have been much more helpful for both designers and librarians or information specialists and Knowledge Managers. Of course, this is the problem also with search; the meaning of words or phrases like “Search Patterns.” Suzanne Langer in her 1950s book, Philosophy in a new key, explains like Sabir-Whorf; if one asks, “Does God exist?” one also has to define what one means by God or “What is God?” which of itself suggests God exists and might be definable.

Although discussed in the previous book Ambient Findability, there is little discussion, although recognition of the problem, for the designers finding ways to avoid the problems of distinguishing between such things as “violin parts,” the music, and “violin parts,” the repair parts, or between things and places with the same name. Searchers are now helped by such things as “autocomplete” and automatic suggestions incorporated into the search engines.

Because the graphic examples are so tiny and difficult to read in color, the authors have given readers a code and URL to use to go online to see the actual book digitally so as to search the embedded links. They also include other links which are not in the book. While it would be good to go on-line and review all the examples against the book’s content, I for one don’t read books on the computer; and feel having to do so would defeat the purpose of publishing a printed book in the first place.