This blog sets out to list what I regard as a core set of resources for anyone involved in enterprise search.  I am sure that there are other resources that I have omitted and if you know of any please send me an email.

Books

I trust you will understand why I want to give Successful Enterprise Search Management pride of place as I am the co-author with Stephen Arnold. We have had some very good reviews of the book, which can be downloaded as a pdf or ordered in a print version. If you want to understand the technology (and mathematics!) of information retrieval then turn to Search Engines – Information Retrieval in Practice by Croft, Metzler and Strohman and Introduction to Information Retrieval by Manning, Raghaven and Schutze. There is a very interesting approach to book publishing being taken by Morgan and Claypool Publishers, who are delivering individual Synthesis Lectures on Information Concepts, Retrieval, and Services. Four have been published, but I am eagerly awaiting Faceted Search by Danny Tunkelang, one of the co-founders of Endeca. Stephen Arnold is the world authority on Google, and his books are published by Infonortics. If you want to learn the mathematical basis of the Google PageRank then read Google’s PageRank and Beyond by Langville and Meyer.

The early history of text retrieval is documented in The History of Online Information Services by Bourne and Hahn. Despite the number of recent books Information Retrieval,  written in 1979 by C.J.van Rijsbergen, remains a masterpiece of scholarship. A book with the same title was authored by Grossman and Frieder in 2004 as one of series of 27 books on information retrieval published over a period of some ten years by Springer. On a slightly different but related topic there are some books on the search functionality of SharePoint 2007 emerging. Those by Tisseghem and Fastrup, and Rizzo, Riley and Young are on my bookshelf, but there are many others. Most give a Microsoft view of the world even if not published by Microsoft Press.

Reports

The CMSWatch Search and Information Access Report provides excellent appraisals of the main search applications, and there is nothing else quite like it. Stephen Arnold provides some shorter profiles in Beyond Search, published by Gilbane, though the report was written in early 2008 and has not been updated. James Robertson provides very practical guidance on usability issues in Improving Intranet Search.

Web Sites and Blogs

Top of my list of Favourites come Miles Kehoe and his colleagues at New Idea Engineering and Stephen Arnold with Beyond Search and ArnoldIT. New Idea Engineering offer a range of white papers other publications, and also run the Searchdev.org site. Stephen is excellent on analysis and picking up news stories. Add them together and no other site comes close. Another very good site is Search Tools. compiled by search consultant Avi Rappoport. SharePointSearch provides good coverage of the SharePoint search area. For a comprehensive set of other web sites and blogs go to Jed Cawthorne’s excellent PageFlakes site. Missing from the site is a set of 15 essays on search by Tim Bray which should be required reading for anyone involved in enterprise search. Tim wrote them in 2003 but they have not dated. The Enterprise Search entry in Wikipedia is virtually useless. I might have to do something about it! The Enterprise Search Center site set up by Information Today to support the Enterprise Search Summit events lacks quality content – an opportunity missed. The web site for the Search Engine Meeting contains all the presentations that have been made at the event since 2001.
 

Martin White