Editorial

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/