studies

This page highlights independent studies about search and about search engine optimisation (SEO).

It covers -

• introduction
• orientations
• specialist literature
• DIY guides

     introduction

In discussing online information seeking and navigation we noted ongoing growth of specialist literature, often with a rigorous empirical base, regarding search algorithms and human interaction with search engines.

Unfortunately few of the insights offered by that research or other areas of cognitive science are apparent in industry or popular writing about SEO.

There are no outstanding works for a general audience by an SEO practitioner and contact with particular SEO vendors has led us to question whether they have more than a casual awareness of methodologies.

     orientations

For a grounding see Web Search: Public Searching of the Web (London: Springer 2004) by Amanda Spink & Bernard Jansen, Google's PageRank and Beyond: The Science of Search Engine Rankings (Princeton: Princeton Uni Press 2006) by Amy Langville & Carl Meyer, Annabel Pollock & Andrew Hockley's 1997 What's Wrong with Internet Searching paper and Modern Information Retrieval (London: Longman 1999) by Ricardo Baeza-Yates & Berthier Ribero-Neto.

Langville & Meyer cite this site, among others.

There is a broader perspective in Elaine Svenonius' The Intellectual Foundation of Information Organisation (Cambridge: MIT Press 2000), Christine Borgman's From Gutenberg to the Global Information Infrastructure: Access To Information in the Networked World (Cambridge: MIT Press 2000) and Preferred Placement: Knowledge Politics on the Web (Maastricht: Jan van Eyck Akademie Editions 2000) edited by Richard Rogers.

     specialist literature

As points of entry regarding the specialist literature see Donald Case's Looking for Information: A Survey of Research on Information Seeking, Needs and Behavior (New York: Academic Press 2002), Bernard Jansen's 2000 paper A Review of Web Searching Studies, Richard Belew's Finding Out About: Search Engine Technology From A Cognitive Perspective (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni Press 2001) and Web Work: Information Seeking & Knowledge Work on the World Wide Web (New York: Kluwer 2000) by Chun Wei Choo, Brian Detlor & Don Turnbull.

Papers of particular value include What Do Web Users Do? An Empirical Analysis of Web Use (PDF) by Andy Cockburn & Bruce McKenzie and the Analysis of a very large web search engine query log study by Craig Silverstein, Hannes Marais & Michael Moricz.

For 'fake' web pages see the 2007 paper (PDF) by Yi-Min Wang, Ming Ma, Yuan Niu & Hao Chen.

     DIY

Search Engine Optimization for Dummies (New York: Wiley 2005) by Peter Kent is one of several DIY guides.

::