some reviews from a seo expert

With our focus on search marketing at Search Engine Land, it’s unusual for me to review an academic textbook, but Search User Interfaces is an unusual book—and I mean that as high praise.

Author Marti Hearst is a professor in the School of Information at the University of California, Berkeley. A primary focus of Dr. Hearst’s research is user interfaces for search, and she’s invented or participated in the development of many of the search interfaces that are now standard on the web.

For search marketers, the book offers some great insights into how people interact with search engines—what they look for, things they like and dislike, and how the overall search experience can be improved—all things that we can learn from to improve our own campaigns. Apart from being a fascinating history of the development of search interfaces, the book also discusses research that points to new developments we can expect in search interfaces in the coming years that will undoubtedly have an impact on how we practice our craft as search marketers.

What’s unusual about the book? For starters, the entire book is available free online. You can also watch videos from Dr. Hearst’s U.C. Berkeley course, Search Engines: Technology, Society, and Business. Speakers include a veritable whos-who of luminaries in interface design, including Dr. Jan Pedersen, Yahoo Search, Manager of Search Relevance (also a chief architect of AltaVista), Dr. Peter Norvig, Google’s Director of Search Quality, Sergey Brin, co-founder of Google, Dr. Sue Dumais from Microsoft Research and many more.

In all, a wealth of information to satisfy the inner search geek in all of us.