For the last year or so I’ve been working with Professor Udo Kruschwitz of the University of Essex on a long-form journal article on enterprise search – although at 156 pages this is more of a book than a journal. Released as part of the Foundations and Trends® in Information Retrieval series by Now Publishing, the book attempts to review the current state of the art of enterprise search from both a theoretical and practical point of view. We start by defining enterprise search, explore a little of the industry landscape, discuss best implementation practice and evaluation techniques and then take a look at the future.
Our intention was to combine our skills and experience, drawn both from academia and industry, and create something that would be useful for both those interested in researching enterprise search (perhaps for a PhD) and those developing actual search systems. Once you’ve read the book itself there are over 20 pages of references (derived both from academia and industry) to follow up. Hopefully the book will complement Martin White’s seminal Enterprise Search (Martin has kindly reviewed it for us here).
Huge thanks must go of course to my co-author Udo, Mark Sanderson at Now Publishing, those who reviewed early drafts including Martin White and David Hawking and all those who have provided help and information. The book will be available in printed form at the SIGIR 2017 conference in Tokyo and the publishers have also made the entire book available for free download until July 29th. We would of course be very grateful for any feedback! We’re also planning some joint presentations this autumn to introduce the book.
We’d also like to hope that our book goes a little way towards explaining what is still a much misunderstood, over-hyped and over-sold field – as Martin writes today.
