The speakers were both there to talk about their recent books: prolific author Martin White of Intranet Focus has written a book on Enterprise Search with the strapline ‘Enhancing Business Performance’. Martin has decades of experience in the sector, an enviable collection of war stories from inside the enterprise and was as ever an engaging speaker.

Next up were Tony Russell-Rose and Tyler Tate to talk about their new book which focuses on the user experience of search. ‘Designing the Search Experience’ promises to be a rich resource on how, why and where people use search and how this impacts the design of user interfaces.

The evening ended with some lively discussion and a promise that after its long absence this Meetup will now be happening on a more regular basis. We’re also running our own Cambridge search meetup – the next event is on February 21st where we’ll be hearing about web crawling and scraping. Another date for your diary is the Enterprise Search Europe conference on May 15th & 16th this year – the programme has just been published and features speakers from Ernst & Young and Oracle. I’ll also be running a workshop the day before the conference on Getting the Best from Open Source Search.

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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.

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