Welcome to the summer 2012 edition of Informer. Summer? Wasn’t that the time of the year with no rain and plenty of sunshine and cocktails on white beaches? It seems the summer has passed without even saying hello. But wait, most of this summer’s IR action is still to come when SIGIR 2012 kicks off… Continue reading Editorial
Design Principles for Mobile Search
Apple’s iOS Human Interface Guidelines and Google’s Android Design Guidelines both provide valuable guidance for designing general mobile applications. But there are a number of design principles that can help us achieve effective mobile search experiences in particular. Namely, most mobile search applications should prioritize content over controls, provide answers over results, and ensure cross-channel continuity.
Designing Faceted Search: Getting the basics right (pt 3)
Faceted search offers tremendous potential for transforming the search experience. It provides a flexible framework by which users can satisfy a wide variety of information needs, ranging from simple fact retrieval to complex exploratory search and discovery-oriented problem solving. But how do we extend such a framework to accommodate not just dozens of facet values,… Continue reading Designing Faceted Search: Getting the basics right (pt 3)
Call for Book Reviews
This month we include another Call for Reviews in which we seek reviewers for a number of recently published books that may be of interest to the IR community. . Books will be allocated for review on a first-come-first-served basis and you would have about one month to carry out the review. If you are… Continue reading Call for Book Reviews
Events Summer 2012
Forthcoming Events Edited By Andy MacFarlane Conferences/Workshops ACM SIGIR 2012. The worlds top IR conference. Portland, Oregon, USA, 12th – 16th August 2012. http://www.sigir.org/sigir2012/ IIiX 2012. The biannual conference on Information interaction in Context. Nijmegen, the Netherlands, 21-24th August 2012. http://iiix2012.org/
Editorial
Welcome back! What a busy period this has been since our winter issue had come out, and what a lot of activities. Most of the editorial team has just returned from an excellent ECIR 2012 in Barcelona and you can read more about the conference in this issue (a small challenge: spot the editors in… Continue reading Editorial
Conference Review: ECIR 2012 Industry Day
The annual BCS IRSG European Conference on Information Retrieval (ECIR 2012) was held in Barcelona, Spain, this year. The 34th edition of the conference has been organized by Yahoo! Research, Universitat Pompeu Fabra and Barcelona Media, supported by BCS IRSG and ACM SIGIR. The conference represented a valuable moment for researchers to share their results.… Continue reading Conference Review: ECIR 2012 Industry Day
Book Review: Search Analytics for Your Site
Search Analytics for Your Site, L. Rosenfeld. ISBN: 1-933820-20-9 (paper) and 1-933820-04-7 (digital) Financial services company The Vanguard Group had just purchased a shiny new search engine to improve search for their 12,000 employees. There was only one problem: the search results were worse than what they had before. John Ferrara, an information architect who… Continue reading Book Review: Search Analytics for Your Site
Conference review: ECIR 2012
ECIR 2012 took place in Barcelona at a campus of the Pompeu Fabra University which is situated not far from the city centre. Despite the size of the city, most ECIR participants stayed around the same area and wherever you went, you inadvertently bumped into a few other fellow attendees every day & night. The… Continue reading Conference review: ECIR 2012
Call for Book Reviews
Periodically we will be sending out a Call for Reviews in which we seek reviewers for a number of recently published books that may be of interest to the IR community. Instead of including book reviews in this issue of Informer, we would like to issue a call for interested parties to review one of the books… Continue reading Call for Book Reviews