Books List

The list is in reverse chronological order of publication, going back to 2010. There are of course many earlier books, notably Introduction to Information Retrieval by Manning, Raghavan and Schutze but I had to stop somewhere. The earliest book on my bookshelf is An Introduction to Modern Information Retrieval by none other than Gerard Salton and Michael McGill, published in 1986.

History of enterprise search 1938-2022 Martin White
A history of the development of enterprise search from punched cards to artificial intelligence (2022)

Taxonomies – Practical Approaches to Developing and Managing Vocabularies for Digital Information Helen Lippell (Editor)
A valuable introduction to taxonomy management from a wide range of authors, including some specific contributions on enterprise search (2022)

Understanding and evaluating search experience Maria Stone
Although the focus is on web search (the author works for Spotify) the book has relevance to all search implementations. (2022)

Making Knowledge Management Clickable Zach Wahl and Joseph Hilger
This book spans what is so often a crevasse between knowledge management and IT systems management (2022)

David Hawking – an autobiography
David Hawking was a pioneer in the development of commercial enterprise search applications. (2022)

Information – A Historical Introduction. Ann Blair, Paul Duguid, Anja-Silvia Goeing, and Anthony Grafton (Editors)
A 900 page collection of 13 chapters and over 100 essays on the development of information management over the last six centuries.(2021)

Search Interface Design and Evaluation Chang Liu, Ying-Hsang Liu, Jingjing Liu and Ralf Bierig
A comprehensive review of the research literature on the design and evaluation of search user interfaces. (2021)

Trustworthy Online Controlled Experiments Ron Kohavi, Diane Tang and Ya Xu
A/B testing is a core element in the development of effective search applications.  The authors have extensive experience from working at Microsoft, Google and LinkedIn (2021)

Task intelligence for search and recommendation Chirag Shah and Ryen W. White
The focus of this book is on the ways in which the intent of a search user can be determined by the search application in order to improve recall and relevance. (2021)

Understanding and Improving Information Search – a Cognitive Approach Wai Tat Fu and Herre van Oostendorp
A collection of 13 essays on the benefits of adopting a cognitive approach to information search, many with direct relevance to optimising enterprise search. (2020)

An introduction to neural information retrieval Bhaskar Mitra and Nick Craswell
This is a good introduction to the principles of neutral information retrieval with a particular emphasis on the role and challenges of machine learning (2018)

Systematic Searching – Practical Ideas for Improving Results Paul Levy and Jenny Craven (Editors)
Systematic searching is undertaken largely in the clinical and pharmaceutical sectors where high levels of retrieval are essential.(2017)

Searching the Enterprise Udo Kruschwitz and Charlie Hull
The authors provide an important bridge between information retrieval research and the practical implementation of search applications. (2017)

Interactions with Search Systems Ryen W. White
Although the focus of this book is on web search, the principles also apply to e-commerce and enterprise search. (2016)

Looking for Information Donald O. Case and Lisa M. Given
A survey of research on information seeking, needs and behaviour, which places search into the wider context of why people seek information and how they interact with search systems. (2016)

Text Data Management and Analysis Cheng Xiang Zhai and Sean Massung
A very comprehensive handbook on the technology of information retrieval and content analytics based on a highly regarded MOOC.(2016)

Enterprise Search Martin White
My objective was to write a book for search managers without a technical background that supported the entire process from building a business case through to evaluating performance. (2015)

Relevant Search Doug Turnbull and John Berryman
The objective of all search applications is to deliver the most relevant results as early as possible in the list of results. Although based around the management of Lucene and Solr this book is applicable to any search application. (2015)

The Inquiring Organisation Chun Wei Choo
The importance of this book is that it provides a context for search within an overall integration of the value of information and knowledge to the organisation. (2015)

Introduction to Information Behaviour Nigel Ford
Information seeking models are a special case of information behaviours. They form the basis of use cases for search, and the design of user interfaces. (2015)

Designing the Search Experience Tony Russell-Rose and Tyler Tate
This book takes a deep look into information seeking models, using them to consider how best to design user interfaces. (2012)

Multilingual Information Retrieval Carol Peters, Martin Braschler and Paul Clough
A good introduction to the basic principles of multilingual and cross-lingual search. (2012)

Interactive Information Seeking, Behaviour and Retrieval Ian Ruthven and Diane Kelly (editors)
A collection of 13 essays on a range of topics (2011)

Search Analytics for Your Site Louis Rosenfeld
This introduction to search analytics is primarily about websites and intranets but the principles apply to enterprise search. (2011)

Innovations in Information Retrieval – Perspectives for Theory and Practice Allen Foster and Pauline Rafferty (editors)
A collection of seven essays on a range of information retrieval topics (2011)

Search Patterns Peter Morville and Jeffery Callender
An innovative approach to understanding the design principles of effective search user interfaces (2010)

Morgan & Claypool and Now Publishers both offer a wide range of books and monographs on specialist aspects of information retrieval and search, though usually with an academic rather than a practitioner focus.