If you’re planning an enterprise search project and have no background in the technologies or principles involved, here are some tips to get you started. This isn’t going to be a definitive list so if you know more, please do comment.
There haven’t been a lot of books written on this area over the years, but more are appearing now (especially on open source options). Managing Gigabytes is a good, if slightly elderly, starting point on basic principles. For thoughts on search user interfaces try Peter Morville’s Search Patterns and for an application focus there’s the recent Search Based Applications. For those developing in the Lucene/Solr world there’s the classic (and recently updated) Lucene in Action and the related Solr 1.4 Enterprise Search Server and Building Search Applications: Lucene, LingPipe, and Gate.
Most people will (of course) start their research on the web, although sometimes it’s hard to find nuggets of real information amongst all the marketing. Wikipedia has a list of vendors, including open source solutions, and Avi Rappaport maintains the useful (although not completely up to date) Search Tools website. Some vendors and some open source projects provide FAQs and tutorials (for example the Lucene FAQ, Xapian and Sphinx documentation), which may also contain general information about search principles.
You might also consider joining discussion groups such as the popular LinkedIn Enterprise Search Engine Professionals or a local Meetup group. Training is another option – offered by some vendors and open source companies such as ourselves.
Marti Hearst’s book Search User Interfaces is also a good resource. And the full text is available online http://searchuserinterfaces.com/book/
There is also a new book out which covers multiple Microsoft search technologies including FAST, ESP and Sharepoint Search Server at http://www.searchcomponentsonline.com/2010/10/sharepoint-and-fast-esp-search-book-ships.html
Thanks Walter, Barry – I wasn’t familiar with those two.
There’s a book in progress called ‘Enterprise Search in Action’ at http://www.manning.com/teutelink/ – looking forward to this one!
You’ll find a similiar listing on my blog at http://www.intranetfocus.com/blog/entry.php?entry=59. This links to two excellent and fairly technical books on search by Croft et al, and Manning et al.
I’ve written two books on search, Making Search Work (published by Facet Publishing in 2007) and Successful Enterprise Search Management with Stephen Arnold as my co-author (www.galatea.co.uk).
The research reports from the Real Story Group are also very useful http://www.realstorygroup.com
Martin