The web is now acknowledged as an integral part of society – work, business, studies, entertainment, recreation and coping with daily life. A monograph on web search engine research, making rich web content accessible, is thus a timely addition to the subject literature. What is unique about Web Search Engine Research is that it approaches the subject from both information science and computer science perspectives: it is not just about technical aspects, but also user behaviour and social issues. Such a multidisciplinary approach, building on collaboration between industry and academia, is required to take research forward.
Dirk Lewandowski and a very able team of international expert contributors can be congratulated on setting the scenario for such future research and portraying the benefits of collaboration between academia and industry. Each well-presented chapter starting with a structured abstract, as well as an extensive list of references.
The work consists of 11 chapters in three parts: emerging areas of web searching, beyond traditional search engine evaluation and new perspectives on web searching. In chapter 1 the editor sketches the need for new perspectives on web search engine research – the search engine market and the challenges to information retrieval. Part 1 includes three chapters dealing respectively with a comparison of social search engines, local web search and the computational analysis of web search statistics in an intelligent framework supporting decision making. Four chapters are presented in part 2. These cover the evaluation of web retrieval effectiveness, diversity-aware search, personalised search engine evaluation, and search engines and rank correlation. Three more chapters are presented in part 3. These deal with technology probe investigation, how search engine users evaluate and select web search results, and a concluding chapter on the thoughts of Kant on truth claims in research traditions, and proposing deeper meanings for the concept of “search”.
The only criticism I can offer is the eight-page index, which covers the basics, but does not really do justice to offering micro-level access to a publication rich in content to accommodate and stimulate research.
Web Search Engine Research is targeted at researchers and practitioners in information science, computer science and communications, as well as web researchers. I highly recommend it for these groups, as well as for recommended reading for postgraduate students – especially with regard to ideas on further research. It should also be read by the providers and developers of search engines, since they can play an essential role in taking research forward: “[…] to gain a better understanding of users; interactions with web search engines, search engine providers should make more such data available to the research community”.
